Preliminary statistical analysis of four site diversity experiment at Ka-band

This paper describes the ongoing site-diversity experiment, consisting of three beacon receiver stations in Slovenia and one station in Austria. All the four stations are identical in configuration and are measuring the 20.2 GHz beacon signal, transmitted from the ASTRA 3B geostationary satellite. The stations were gradually deployed in the years 2014 and 2015. The measured attenuation time series and joint attenuation time series are obtained and statistically analysed. The results are presented in two parts: a) for one full year of collected data from the three Slovenian stations, and b) for seven months of recently collected measurement data in the four-site constellation, including the Austrian station. The results confirm the benefits of site diversity system in terms of significant attenuation reduction. They are compared also to the existing ITU-R and the recently proposed Gaussian copula prediction models and the agreement is satisfactory.