Novel procedure to determine statistical functions of impulsive noise

One of the problems found when measuring impulsive noise is to distinguish this kind of noise from Gaussian noise. Usually, a threshold level is used to make the difference. The problem is that a high threshold level will miss low amplitude pulses, while a low level will include Gaussian noise samples as being impulsive noise. In this paper, results of a novel radio UHF impulsive noise measurement procedure are presented. This work exhibits the peculiarity that data was taken in both horizontal and vertical polarizations simultaneously. One polarization is used to determine the presence of impulsive noise so analysis can be performed in the other polarization considering this circumstance. Measurements were made in four different locations on UHF TV channels around 800 MHz with a bandwidth of 10 MHz, demodulating the in-phase and quadrature phase components in each polarization. When environments are constituted by varied and scattered impulsive sources, horizontal and vertical polarizations show similar statistical behavior. However, horizontal and vertical emissions may be different when a single source is individually measured. The conditional amplitude probability density function (pdf) and conditional amplitude cumulative distribution function (cdf) found for the amplitude in all the locations lead to the conclusion that the variable that best fits the results is a lognormal one.