A Study on the Forest Radio Propagation Characteristics in European Mixed Forest Environment

We study the near ground propagation characteristics in a typical forest environment in the European region. The forest environment is important in the context of military communications, emergency networks and environmental monitoring systems. Our measurement setup focused in lower frequency bands, and in this paper we report our results for the 485 MHz measurement campaign. The lower frequencies offer better propagation characteristics, and the future digital dividends or TV white space rulings open an opportunity to use these frequencies in the forest environment. We propose an attenuation model and compare also our measurements against already suggested propagation models in the literature, which are typically used for this type of environments. We have also studied the shadowing characteristics of the propagation environment and report the preliminary results. The paper shows that the forest type has a significant effect to the propagation and thus European mixed-type of forests requires its own model.