Prediction of the outage performance of an unbalanced orbital diversity earth-space system

A revised statistical model for evaluating the diversity performance of Earth-to-space radio links using the orbital diversity (OD) technique is discussed. The present method includes the more complicated but practical unbalanced diversity case. The results are compared with the only available set of experimental data relative to the asymmetric orbital diversity configuration located at Fucino, Italy between the SIRIP and OTS satellites in the 12 GHz band. The agreement is generally encouraging, for at least the region of attenuation values up to 5 dB