The estimation of direction of arrival (DOA) and polarization of an incident electromagnetic (EM) wave is of great importance in many applications. In this paper we propose a new approach for the estimation of DOA for polarized EM waves using blind separation of sources. In this approach we use a vector sensor, a sensor whose output is a complete set of the EM field components of the irradiating wave, and we reconstruct the waveforms of all the original signals that is, all the EM components of the sources' fields. From the waveform of each source we calculate its amplitude and phase and consequently calculate its DOA and polarization using the field analysis method. The separation of sources is conducted iteratively using a recurrent Hopfield-like single-layer neural network. The simulation results for two sources have been investigated. We have considered coherent and incoherent sources and also the case of varying DOAs vis-ā-vis the sensor and a varying polarization. These are cases seldom treated by other approaches even though they exist in real-world applications. With the proposed method we have obtained almost on-time tracking for the DOA and polarization of any incident sources with a significant reduction of both memory and computation costs. ¿ 1999 American Geophysical Union