An investigation of site diversity and comparison with ITU-R recommendations

Earth‐space radio systems operating at frequencies of 10 GHz and above are badly attenuated by rain, cloud, and atmospheric gases. As the frequencies of operational systems increase, it becomes increasingly uneconomic to compensate for the effects of fading through the use of a fixed fade margin, hence the implementation of fade mitigation techniques (FMT). The spatial and temporal variation of rain provides the justification for the use of site diversity as an FMT. Site diversity employs two or more ground stations receiving the same satellite signal with a separation distance such that the sites encounter intense rainfall at different times, and switching to the site experiencing the least fading improves system performance considerably. Measurements of the 20.7 GHz beacon carried as part of the Global Broadcast Service (GBS) payload on the U.S. Department of Defense satellite UFO‐9 have been made at three sites: two are located in the South of England (∼8 km apart), and the third receiver was located in Scotland. These beacon measurements have produced long term attenuation exceedance and site diversity gain and improvement statistics. This attenuation time series data can simulate the performance of an Earth‐space system using site diversity, indicating the optimum method of implementing this FMT. In this paper, unbalanced site diversity is investigated, as this is a more likely scenario than the balanced site diversity modeled by the ITU‐R recommendations. This paper also investigates the implementation of site diversity from a commercial context, including cost‐benefit analysis and technical feasibility.