Seasonal fade duration statistics for planning of 12 GHz DTH/VSAT and SOHO satellite services in the tropics

Direct-to-home very small aperture terminals and small office home office (DTH/VSAT and SOHO) systems operating at frequencies above 10 GHz in tropical climates are subjected to many fade occurrences due to heavy rains. The rain margin of these terminals is typically less than 10 dB. Quality of service (QoS) and customer perceptions are important issues. In order to consider the use of appropriate fade countermeasures in the overall design of communication networks, service providers must predict when outages are likely to occur, and for how long, and when they will occur again. This paper presents annual and seasonal fade duration and interval data from February 1991 to January 1995 that formed part of the Intelsat funded measurements in Lae, Papua New Guinea (Pan et al. (2001)). A fade duration model developed by Timothy et al. (2000) is evaluated and tested against measured data.