Effects of meteorological parameters and the averaging period on the intensity of tropospheric scintillation

Abstract

The saturation of C-band and the ever-increasing demand for new services that require greater bandwidth has pushed to the exploitation of higher frequencies. The higher frequencies offer various advantages such as, increased bandwidth, smaller antennas, and smaller satellite footprint that give higher EIRP and permit frequency reuse. The main obstacle however is that they are subject to stronger propagation degradation. The small size antennas employed in VSAT and USAT systems significantly reduces the cost of Earth stations terminals and also eliminate tracking requirements, they nevertheless lose the mitigating effect of aperture averaging, and hence experience stronger scintillation. Scintillations are rapid fluctuations in amplitude and phase of the received signal arising from fluctuations in the atmospheric refractive index due to turbulence. Amplitude scintillation occurring in the troposphere increases with signal frequency and depends on a number of other link and meteorological parameters. In this paper the attention is focused on investigating the characteristics of tropospheric scintillation at 18.7, 39.6 and 49.5 GHz using propagation data from the ITALSAT F1 and ITALSAT F2 satellites.