Annual Statistics of the Alphasat Ka and Q-band Propagation Channel in Budapest, Hungary

The Alphasat telecommunication satellite was launched in July, 2013 and beside of the main payload it carries four scientific experiments. One of them is the Aldo Paraboni Scientific Experiment, a propagation experiment in the Ka and Q radio bands. The experiment is coordinated by the European Space Agency under the framework of ARTES 8 Telecom program. Hungary, similarly to other European experimenters established a receiver station in Budapest for each beacon transmitter channels of the satellite. This project was supported and financed by the European Space Agency. Our purpose was to record long time received power level time series of the Ka and Q-band satellite channel among relevant meteorological data as well. The station is operating with its full functionality since mid-2015 and the data collected so far permits the calculation of yearly attenuation statistics, demonstrating the monthly variations and allowing the comparison with relevant ITU-R statistics as well.