AbstractTo develop and test real‐time fade mitigation techniques control algorithms, propagation time series are needed. An alternative to using real data collected from propagation experiments is to generate typical fading time‐series making use of climatological characteristics as well as geometrical and radio‐electrical parameters of the link. The objective of this paper is to present a rain attenuation time‐series synthesizer and able to generate events on demand. The model is based on an enhanced version of the Maseng–Bakken stochastic model. In the first part of this paper, the basic principles of the enhanced Maseng–Bakken model are recalled and the parameterization of this channel model is discussed for temperate European climates. Then, the theoretical bases of the Lacoste–Carrie ‘event‐on‐demand’ model and its validation constitute the second part of this paper. The enhanced Maseng–Bakken model is fully stochastic, whereas the Lacoste‐Carrie ‘event‐on‐demand’ one offers the possibility to command the maximum attenuation level and the duration of the synthesized event. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.