Experimental Validation of Polarization-Matched HF Reception Using a Circular Electromagnetic Vector Antenna Array

High-frequency (HF) reception is often limited by propagation-dependent polarization changes, multipath, and interference. Conventional scalar antennas measure only a fixed projection of the incident electromagnetic field, leaving potentially useful vector-field information unavailable at the receiver. Although electromagnetic vector sensors have been widely studied for direction finding and polarization estimation, few end-to-end field experiments have evaluated whether a full-vector HF array system can improve practical reception. This gap matters because field validation is needed to determine whether polarization-sensitive vector observations remain useful after receiver mismatch, synchronization error, local scattering, and ionospheric variability are included. Here we develop a spatial-polarization combining model and implement a nine-element circular electromagnetic-vector antenna array with a 50 m radius and 54 synchronized receiving channels. Field measurements show SNR improvements above 14 dB at eight ground-wave transmitter locations, SIR improvements of 16.03-22.12 dB in controlled two-source ground-wave experiments, and sky-wave CNR improvements of 12.10, 14.17, and 14.56 dB at 7.045, 9.011, and 11.012 MHz, respectively. These results provide field-based evidence that full-vector HF array reception can enhance weak-signal acquisition and interference resilience under representative ground-wave and sky-wave conditions.