Rain attenuation prediction for non-geostationary sources

Rain attenuation can have a high impact on the service availability of radio communication systems especially that operate in the Ka-band where the rain attenuation is 10 times larger than C-band. Achieving high service availability for satellite link design requires an extensive knowledge about the radio channel behaviour. Satellite systems is one of the most important technology uses to achieve the demands for wireless communications, therefore, an accurate model which is able to predict the rain attenuation is needed indeed to maintain the system availability. This paper presents a new model that is able to predict the earth-space rain attenuation for the nongeostationary sources such as LEO, MEO, and etc. The frequency of the predicted signal that has been carried out in this study is 28 GHz, while the earth station located in Seremban, Malaysia (2.75°N, 101.96°E). The rain attenuation will increase gradually as the satellite moves toward the rain cell edge, then it will decreased linearly till it equals 0dB.