Empirical study of rain fade slope conditional statistics on satellite links

The work presented in this paper gives experimental results on conditional rain fade slope statistics. These can be useful for the design of fade countermeasure intelligent systems (FCMIS). The applicability of Van De Kamp's model for modelling conditional fade slope has been verified. A salient feature of this work is that we have extended the carrier frequency range from 30 GHz (VDK) to 50 GHz. For this, we used data collected from: (i) Spino D' Adda at 20, 40 and 50 GHz; and (ii) Barcelona at 40 GHz. The data has been low-pass filtered using a moving average filter of 20, 40 and 60 s respectively. Then the fade slope has been characterised in detail in each case independently according to the formulation and suggestions given originally in Van De Kamp et al. (2000).