Performance of site diversity technique estimated from time diversity

Satellite communication systems operating above 10 GHz can experience severe rain attenuation; well established countermeasures are site and time diversity. In this paper we exploit experimental data collected in Spino d´Adda to show that the performance of site-diversity systems can be linked to that of time-diversity systems through a precise time-space parameter (the average effective velocity). This parameter can be derived from readily available meteorological data.