A ray-tracing propagation model for digital broadcast systems in urban areas

A propagation model is presented for characterizing the channel response for digital systems in urban areas where multiple reflections from buildings are encountered. A deterministic ray-tracing propagation model is used to predict the time delay and fading characteristics for the channel in a hypothetical urban area. The analysis shows that due to multiple reflection and diffraction sources, the RMS delay spread of the channel in urban areas can be several hundred nanoseconds, so that very effective equalizers will be required to achieve successful performance of high-data-rate digital systems such as 20-Mb 16-QAM digital HDTV. The channel response results presented also suggest that polarization diversity may be a useful technique for mitigating some of the channel impairments predicted by the propagation model.<
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