The effect of terrain roughness in the microwave line-of-sight multipath fading estimation based on Rec. ITU-R P.530-15

Multipath fading is an important constraint on the prediction of path loss for terrestrial line-of-sight microwave links. The International Telecommunication Union — Radiocommunication (ITU-R) Rec. P.530 [1] is one of the most widely used methods providing guidelines for the design of terrestrial line-of-sight links. The purpose of the study presented in this paper is to make an investigation of the effect of both terrain roughness and geoclimatic factor parameters in the path loss characteristics of microwave line-of-sight (LOS) propagation in NATO Band 3+ (1350–2690 MHz) and NATO Band 4 (4440–5000 MHz) frequency ranges. The two parameters led to significantly different results for the link availability due to multipath fading as a function of the fade margin.