Large Scale Characteristics of Ship-to-Land Propagation at 5.2 GHz in Harbor Environment

To investigate the broadband wave propagation channel for communication applications in harbor environments, the German Aerospace Center conducted channel sounder measurements where the transmit antenna was mounted on a ship and the receive antenna was located on land. Using this setup, measurements were performed for C-band at 5.2GHz with a broadband signal of 100MHz bandwidth. Path loss and shadow fading have been studied and are described in this contribution. Results show that the path loss for ship-to-land radio links within harbor environments depends on the geometry. Path loss exponents for non line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation scenarios are extracted with respect to the land-based antenna height. Furthermore, it has been found that there is no significant statistical difference for the shadow fading in line-of-sight and NLoS scenarios.