The effect of fading and shadowing on channel reuse in mobile radio

Co-channel interference probabilities are calculated for mobile radio systems operating in a Rayleigh fading lognormal shadowing environment with inverse fourth power law dependence of area mean signal level on range. Interference levels are shown to be high even with generous reuse distances. The results are used to calculate spectrum utilization using reasonable but tentative estimates of protection ratio and channel spacing for SSB systems. On this basis SSB offers a higher spectral efficiency than current 25 kHz spaced FM systems.