Experimental characterization of outdoor microcellular quasi-static channels in the UHF and SHF bands

Abstract

In order to explore design alternatives for point-to-multipoint high rate data transmission systems in various UHF and SHF bands, experimental measurements of radio propagation were made in urban and suburban areas. This paper reports on extensive continuous wave (CW) and wideband measurements performed at four carrier frequencies: 1.44275 GHz, 6.7 GHz, 14.72 GHz and 22.025 GHz. Measurements were carried out in the Montreal metropolitan and suburban areas with both transmitter and receiver stationary. The transmitter was located outside on the rooftop of a high rise building and the receiver inside another building. The receiver was then moved for each new set of measurements such that a whole room was covered in a grid-like fashion. Results from the temporal experiments show, that for the suburban area, the amplitude distributions are lognormal-distributed. The urban area presents more Ricean-distributed amplitude data. The data for the spatially-distributed case also showed that for the suburban and urban areas, the local means of the fluctuations are well described by a Nakagami distribution.