Site Diversity Experiment in Q-Band Satellite Communications in Slovenia and Hungary

To enable throughput rates in the terabit-per-second range, future satellite communications will have to utilize a large available bandwidth Q-band and above. At these high frequencies, signal is severely degraded attenuated by tropospheric phenomena, especially rainfall, which reduces availability of communication link degrades quality service. Site diversity an efficient technique used mitigate rain attenuation. In this paper, we evaluate performance large-scale site system consisting ground stations Ljubljana Budapest based on long-term measurement campaigns Alphasat at 39.402 GHz. The measured attenuation time series are statistically analyzed presented for period one year compared with three representative prediction models.