Wideband Analysis of the Satellite Communication Channel at Ku- and X-Bands

The results of a wideband channel measurement campaign carried at Ku-band and X-band are presented and discussed in this paper. The propagation effects in the satellite-to-mobile radio link due to the environment surrounding the terrestrial terminal have been characterized using a sweep time delay cross-correlation (STDCC) sounder. The campaign was carried out in four different environments: wooded, rural, suburb and urban. From these results, we obtained the root-mean-square delay spread and coherence bandwidth of the radio channel. The low coherence bandwidth values found for urban and suburb environments suggest that channel equalization would be needed for high-data-rate services. The delay spread values for these two environments are also larger than for wooded and rural environments. A detailed analysis of the results shows that three-state semi-Markov narrow-band channel models for satellite communications could be easily extended to wideband.