> Is this possible, for a signal to be both left- and right-hand polarized? Yes, it's very much possible: While the superposition of two orthogonal circular polarizations might¹ indeed look linear (just as the superposition of a horizontal and a vertical polarized wave at appropriate phasing is a circularly polarized wave), of course that means that a linearly polarized wave is at the same time circularly polarized in both directions. Technically, this is widely exploited: Satellite receivers use polarization multiplex. That is awesome, because you get two totally independently useful "subchannels", as long all media the wave travels through is a largely a linear medium and anisotropic. (And the microwave frequencies geostationary satellite downlink channel fulfills that pretty well.) Even if that's not the case, you still get *some* isolation between RHCP and LHCP, and can use that for MIMO techniques to increase your data rate or robustness beyond what you can do on a single polarization. <hr> ¹ might because that's not necessarily the case. Remember the Poincaré sphere: [](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poincaresp.png) When you add waves of different polarizations, you wander on the surface of that sphere; only when you add RHCP and LHCP with the same magnitude, you end up with a linear polarization. The angle of that is then defined by the phase between the two constituent waves; every other combination, every attenuation that affects one rotational sense more than the other, will produce an elliptic polarization. Let me rephrase your question: > Is this possible, for a *wave* to be both left- and right-hand polarized at the same time? No, that's not possible, because any wave can only occupy **one** point in polarization space.