Seasonal and diurnal effects on Ku-band site-diversity performance measured in a rainy tropical region

The performance and availability of Ku-band satellite broadband and DTH services are affected by rain fades. Site-diversity is an effective form of fade countermeasure. Statistics of seasonal and diurnal variations in the occurrence of rain fades, together with the fade and inter-fade durations, are needed to give a detailed insight for system design of these services, This paper presents a year's worth of site-diversity data measured from an equatorial mountainous coastal location and concentrates on seasonal and diurnal variation aspects. A companion paper (Pan et al., 2001) deals with joint statistics and average duration issues.