A Simple Analytical Model for the Envelope Distribution of a Sinusoidal Carrier in Atmospheric Radio Noise

A recent article by Omura and Shaft [1] proposed modeling atmospheric radio noise as a narrow-band process having a lognormal envelope distribution. Based on such a model, an approximate expression is derived for the envelope probability distribution of a sinusoidal carrier in atmospheric radio noise. The results are compared with measured distribution of the instantaneous amplitude out of a wide-band envelope detector Watt and Plush [2], and show good agreement over the range of input carrier-to-noise ratios for which measurements were made.