Investigation of rain fading on a 26GHz link in tropical climate

Links both terrestrial and Earth-space operating at bands higher than 10GHz inevitably suffer severe signal degradation due to rain fade particularly in the tropics. The study had investigated the likely impacts of rain fading on the links performance at 26GHz frequency, where rain attenuation at 26GHz had been measured for a period of over one year in Malaysia. Studies include in the attempt to quantify the rain-induced degradations. Analyses result presented consists of seasonal variations and the annual cumulative distributions. The study also includes assessment of time-diversity mitigation technique application. The technique entails a process of retransmission of signals to obtain the required signal gain for better output signal. Preliminary analyses comprise of generation of diversity gain values of specific time delays.