Effects of Rain Attenuation on Satellite EHF (Extremely High Frequency) Communications in the United States

摘要

One-minute rain rate data over a 10-year period-of-record at each of 41 locations in the contiguous U.S., and for a 6 1/2-year period-of-record at 1 location in Puerto Rico, were extracted from original weighing raingage recordings. The data were analyzed to determine monthly, seasonal, and annual rain-rate frequencies, durations, and probabilities at locations representing a large variety of climatic rainfall regimes. These analyses are particularly useful for estimating EHF (Extremely High Frequency) communication outages due to the increasing effects of attenuation caused by rain at frequencies above 10 GHz. An attenuation model was used to estimate the effects of rain attenuation at all 42 locations. Analyses of the 1-min rain rates, and outage estimates for various frequencies and propagation-path elevation angles are presented. (rh)