Four Years of Total Attenuation Statistics of Earth-Space Propagation Experiments at Ka-Band in Toulouse

The Ka-band propagation experiments conducted by ONERA in Toulouse (43.57°E, 1.47°N) in the southwest of France started in 2009 and is still on-going. The equipment comprises a beacon Earth station, a profiling radiometer, and a rain gauge. The ground station measures the received beacon signal using a 10-Hz sampling rate. The profiling radiometer measures the sky brightness temperatures at five Ka-band and seven V-band channels, surface temperature, surface humidity, and surface pressure. From July 2009 to March 2011, the beacon receiver recorded the 19.7-GHz (horizontal polarization) HotBird 6 beacon signal along a slant path of 38.6° of elevation angle. Since April 2011, the beacon receiver has been recording the 20.2-GHz (vertical polarization) Astra 3B beacon signal along a slant path of 35.1° of elevation angle. This paper aims at providing a complete description of the ONERA Data Processing Tool (in particular the methodology followed to retrieve total attenuation) used to compute 4 years (from July 2009 to June 2013) of copolar attenuation statistics. The experimental setup and the characteristics of the Earth-space links are briefly described. The complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of total attenuation for the whole period is presented and compared with ITU-R recommendations. The measured CCDF of the rainfall rate is computed and compared with ITU-R Rec. P.837 and will also be used as input for the rain attenuation model given in ITU-R Rec. P.618. The measured CCDFs of total attenuation duration and total attenuation slope are also presented.