A study of at-sea propagation channels using wavetank measured data

Propagation characteristics of at-sea communication channels are studied by analyzing measurements from a wavetank facility. It is shown that a Gaussian model of channel time statistics appears appropriate for the measurements, leading to a Rician distribution for field magnitudes. The power spectral density of the received incoherent power is also examined, and found to be well approximated by an empirical function previously used in studies of at-sea channels. These statistics completely characterize the time-varying propagation channel, allowing parameters such as fade duration, fade occurrence interval, etc., to be determined.