Propagation effects on the wideband gapfiller communication link

This paper investigates the propagation effects on the wideband gapfiller satellite communication link. The atmospheric loss and rain attenuation are estimated using the current empirical atmospheric gaseous and rain models. In addition, the contributions on system noise temperature due to rain and gaseous attenuation are also estimated. The attenuation results are presented for a range of link availability at X-band uplink/Ka-band downlink, X-band uplink/X-band downlink, and Ka-band uplink/Ka-band downlink. Further, the results of well-known rain models, i.e., Crane (1980), ITU-R (1997), and COMSAT/DAH (1997), are compared.