Effects of Different Losses on Satellite Systems

Abstract

Satellite signal quality during propagation degrades due to absorption, scattering of the particles in space. For high information rate satellite technologies, this degradation significantly affects the received information. This degradation also depends on the link, atmospheric losses. Rain, cloud imposes a major effect on signal attenuation above 10 GHz frequencies. Low elevation angle transmission during rain, condensed clouds increases the effective path length and causes degradation in the received signal level. The change of transmitted signal parameters like frequency f and elevation angle θ, impacts atmospheric impairments considerably. In this paper, effects free space loss, rain attenuation and cloud attenuation are studied in the frequency range of 10-50 GHz for lower elevation angles. The link calculation method is used for determining free space loss. The ITU-R Rec. P.837-4 and ITU-R Rec. P.676-11 are used for calculation of rain and cloud attenuations respectively. The results of these three losses are plotted and tabulated using MATLAB software.