Practical performance of SDH microwave links with extremely long hops

The error performance of the extremely long (143 km) live SDH STM-1 microwave radio-delay link has been measured throughout 60 days of the usually worst period of the year (summertime), in order to find out how the practically achieved transmission performance compare to the ITU-R recommendations, which have evolved from the bit-error-rate based (G.821) to block-error-rate based ones (G.826) and have been proposed for much shorter links but only supposed to be valid for the longer ones as well. The extensive measurements campaign has been made and the results encourage the conclusion that, for the well designed radio-relay system, the transmission performance can be realistically expected to be well within the predicted limits even for very long hops.