Design and Development of Ka Band Digital Beacon Receiver for Ka Band Propagation Studies Experiment

India is planning to conduct its own Ka band propagation studies experiment in order to validate the existing ITU model and to develop a more accurate prediction model for its unique climate condition for guaranteed QoS. This experiment involves measurement of signal attenuation due to rain and development of appropriate mathematical propagation models. This requires a ground receiver to receive beacon signal at 20.2 & 30.5 GHz onboard GSAT-4.This paper describes a novel design philosophy of Digital receiver based Digital Beacon Receiver to receive and measure the amplitude of beacons at 20.2GHz and 30.5 GHz, both polarization (V&H), with accuracy better than +/0.7 dB with measurement rate of 1 Hz and better. This unique receiver receives all the four port data simultaneously using single antenna and does signal processing to achieve the desired accuracy. The test results obtained has been discussed.