Citation
Abstract
Enabling communications at very low elevation angles can lengthen the duration of a tracking pass between a satellite and a ground station, which in turn can increase the amount of data return and possibly reduce the number of required supporting ground station tracking passes. Link performance, especially at very low angles and high frequencies, depends heavily on terrain, atmosphere, and weather conditions. Among the different contributions to attenuation, scintillation fading plays a very significant role and can impair the performance of the link. It is therefore necessary to accurately model the overall impact to the link due to scintillation fading. The current International Telecommunication Union ITU-R P.618-10 Recommendation describes three scintillation loss models as a function of elevation angle and percentage of time for which the loss exceeds a certain threshold. Implementation of the recommendation resulted in the uncovering of several issues. Particularly, it was identified that (i) iterative solutions to an implicit nonlinear exponential model, in some cases, are not guaranteed to exist, (ii) there is a discontinuity in fading values between models at the cross-over elevation angle, (iii) at certain low elevation angles scintillation from the shallow fade model generates unrealistically small losses, and (iv) for elevation angles lying between 4 and 5 deg, there are two applicable scintillation models that yield conflicting values. In this article, we develop a new approach to unify the different fading models within the current ITU recommendation and fully remove the discrepancies. We further validated our models with ITU-adopted scintillation data measured at Goonhilly, Great Britain, and data from several recent NASA Space Shuttle launches. This improved model was provisionally approved at the ITU International Meeting in Italy, November 2010, and is being evaluated by the ITU members for adoption into the nextversion ITU Recommendation.
Details
- Volume
- 42-185
- Published
- May 15, 2011
- Pages
- 1–13
- File Size
- 1.4 MB