Characterization of maritime RF/FSO channel

The growing demand on high speed data transmission as well as the bandwidth limitation of microwave (RF) transmission has stimulated the development of free-space optical (FSO) laser communication links during the last years. Making the data transmission reliable is one of the challenging problems that have to be solved to establish a communication system suitable for commercial usage. Optical transmission is highly impacted by different channel conditions, leading from signal damping to turbulence effects due to the atmosphere. In this paper a hybrid RF/FSO maritime channel is investigated. The link distance under investigation is about 14 km. Transmitted data collected during a 6 months measurement campaign is evaluated and theoretically analyzed. The correlation between weather and atmospheric impacts to the large amount of RF and FSO transmission data available, will provide an insight into the capability of estimating channel quality.