Spectral characteristics of propagation impairments on experimental Earth-space links at Ka and V bands

Due to the increasing demand for multimedia services which require large bandwidth, and due to the saturation of low frequency bands such as L, S, C bands, as well as Ku band, satellite telecommunication systems are migrating to higher frequency bands such as Ka band (20/30 GHz) and V band (40/50 GHz). In such high frequency bands, the presence of the atmosphere strongly affects radiowave propagation and attenuation effects become so severe that system availability would not be sufficient if systems were designed in a conventional way with a static propagation margin. Thus new concepts known as fade mitigation techniques (such as up-link power control, adaptive coding or modulation, diversity techniques) have to be implemented into the system in order to be able to compensate in real time propagation effects that could cause link outage. The objective of this study is to perform a spectral analysis of the Ka and V band propagation channel for channel modelling and fade mitigation techniques implementation. To reach this objective two months of Olympus and Italsat data were processed