A study of satellite channel utilization in the presence of rain attenuation in Florida

Rain attenuation is the most dominant cause of signal degradation in satellite links operating at Ka-band. This is a particularly serious issue for ground terminal stations located in a sub-tropical region such as state of Florida. Presently, most rain compensation algorithms are based on the use of a fixed, large fade margin to combat occasional deep fades. However, the use of a fixed margin, especially for a rainy region, results in an inefficient use of channel capacity for a high percentage of the time. This paper uses an adaptive rain fade counter-measure based on the effective utilization of the channel capacity for several Florida locations with links operating in the Ka-band. In order to determine the outage rates both in terms of channel capacity and BER, Manning´s (1990) rain attenuation prediction model, based on the rain history of the transmitting and receiving stations has been employed