Experimental validation of ITU method for terrestrial line-of-sight links design

The fading prediction methods are an issue of great importance which requires more investigations especially in broadband digital systems. ITU-R P.530 recommendation is one of the most used methods providing guidelines for terrestrial line-of-sight links design. This paper investigates the validity of this method by comparing the theoretical predictions with two years measurements carried out in different geoclimatic regions in Quebec (Canada). The worst month outage probability, the annual conversion factor and improvements factors in space and frequency diversity are obtained from measurements and statistics of the data, and show a good agreement. The discrepancies between prediction and measurements are in concordance with those calculated over links used originally to elaborate this ITU recommendation.