Impacts of Weather and Environmental Conditions on Mobile Communication Signals

Abstract

The impacts of weather and environmental conditions on mobile communication signals were determined in this study. A Glo mobile communication network operating in the 900MHz band was considered. The Glo fixed base transceiver station (BTS) location at Gloworld in Benin City was considered. A frequency-signal tracker software, version 2.5.1 was installed and configured into a notebook Intel palm top, relative parameters data were obtained from 200 meters from the Glo BTS from 28th of July to 31st of August 2016, with data obtained hourly. Morning, afternoon and evening, and dry weather, fog weather and raining conditions was based on the statistical central tendency parameters. The average refractivity gradient observed was -61.3 N/km. It was observed that dry weather, signal strength variation was within 32 dBm, fog, variation was within 34 dBm range, while the variation of rain was within 38 dBm range indicating higher variation. It was observed that the more the mobile station move away from the BTS the higher the signal loss and that temperature and refractivity gradient has 0.50 and 0.42 positive correlations. In addition, relative humidity and pressure possesses negative correlations of -0.50 and -0.44 respectively.