Low cost hybrid RF-FSO to reduce rain effect in tropical region

Precipitation is already known to severely affect and degrade the performance of any RF system above 10 GHz and free space optic (FSO) communications. The limitation is very unattractive for FSO system utilization in the tropical region where liquid precipitations such as rain is frequent and of high intensity. An experimental low cost hybrid RF-FSO system has been developed to study rain effect on link performance and stability for 500 m and 1000 m range. The hybrid system uses low cost commercial 2400 MHz for RF and lab-developed 850 nm free space optic transmission. The results from the study on rain effects provide good estimation of such system performance and reliability for use in countries in the tropical region such as Malaysia. The measured result is compared with the ITU-R rain model for link loss and the performance is analyzed.