Effects of azimuthal difference on orbital diversity using multiple satellites

In this paper, we have shown two-year-long measurement results of rain attenuation for four geostationary satellite links differing in their azimuthal angles to show the effects of orbital diversity. The orbital diversity gain is found to increase linearly a a function of the angular separation of two satellites for cumulative probabilities less than 0.01 % while the increase of the diversity gain is not appreciable for cumulative probabilities higher than 0.05 %. This indicates that we can achieve the orbital diversity gain higher than 2 dB for heavy rains for which the cumulative probability is lower than 0.01 % when we take the azimuthal separation of two satellites wider than about 50°.