Measurement and prediction of digital radio performance on a long overwater path

The simultaneous field trial performance of 34 Mbit/s 4PSK, 2 × 34 Mbit/s 8PSK and 4 × 34 Mbit/s 16QAM digital radio systems over a 158 km overwater path in Australia is reported, and the measured outage performance is then used to derive propagation data, which in turn is used to predict performance using quadruple diversity. In addition, a generalised outage prediction technique is derived for n diversity.