Ku-band diurnal fade characteristics and fade event duration data from three, two-year, Earth-space radiometric experiments in Equatorial Africa

The move to provide direct to home (DTH) multi-media services from satellites requires a number of new insights to be gleaned from the propagation effects that occur along satellite-to-ground paths. Annual statistics will not be sufficient to describe the likely performance of the link, nor will they provide information on the likely customer acceptance of the DTH service. What are required are the likely number of outages due to rain attenuation in a given period, their duration, the time between the outages, and the diurnal characteristics of rain attenuation along the link. This paper presents results obtained in three, two-year, Ku-band experiments in tropical Africa on diurnal attenuation effects, as well as on rain and attenuation event duration and inter-event duration. The implications of the results are discussed. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.