Abstract Conventional polarization diversity suffers from a strong imbalance between the average powers received on its two diversity branches. A novel method is proposed to tackle this problem by pre-combining of the two diversity branches before diversity combining process. Equal average received branch powers thus can be obtained. Theoretical analysis as well as physical interpretation is presented. Numerical examples under typical channel model show that the proposed method can be used to improve the diversity performance significantly, especially in the high Cross Polarization Discrimination (XPD) environments.