VHF General Urban Path Loss Model for Short Range Ground-to-Ground Communications

From a radio frequency propagation perspective, the general focus of the commercial wireless communications community has been primarily on frequencies above 800 MHz. Therefore, there is a limited number of available empirical data and validated prediction methods indicating what type of path loss or signal degradation one should expect in various urban settings at a very high frequency (VHF) range, which is the range of operation for numerous military tactical communications systems. Furthermore, the extensive literature survey revealed that indoor propagation models are particularly lacking in either availability and/or proven fidelity. This paper presents a new general urban path loss model derived from a log-distance path loss model, floor attenuation factor model and path loss measurements taken on campus of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), Laurel, MD, with a measurement hardware suite in 30-88 MHz frequency range. The authors felt that there is a void in the open literature on simple, empirically-verified large-scale path loss models that implicitly address the lower VHF range, more than one urban setting, short communications ranges (<1 km) and low transmitting and receiving antenna heights as well as offer reasonably high fidelity without requiring a lot of information about the site.