The Alphasat Aldo Paraboni experiment: Fade mitigation techniques in Q/V-band satellite channels, first results

The Alphasat Aldo Paraboni Payload incorporates two Q/V-band satellite transponders, which covers three spot beams over Europe placed towards Italy and towards Graz/Austria. JOANNEUM RESEARCH developed and installed the ground station in Graz and operates communication experiments since beginning of 2014. The goal is to optimize the usage of the Q/V-band channel especially with respect to its high rain fades. In the first period of operation, particularly adaptive coding and modulation has been used as fade mitigation technique. In this paper, we present the architecture of the ground station, the setup and configuration of the experiments, as well as the results from the first nine months of operation. This includes a first estimate of the trade-off between the achievable spectral efficiency vs. the residual frame error rate with respect to the properties of the corresponding Q/V-band satellite link.