An inexpensive rain fade countermeasure technique for DA-TDMA satellite systems

Rain attenuation countermeasure systems for geostationary satellite transmissions have been proposed that use a variety of methods. This paper presents a technique which only requires a burst modem that is able to vary its bit and coding rate on a sub-burst basis coupled with a convolutional encoder/Viterbi decoder. A complete method for predicting the attenuation at the receive time is described for two different DA-TDMA systems, using centralized and distributed control, respectively. The method is used for choosing the up power, bit and coding rate of the data to be transmitted. Its performance is evaluated on the basis of experimental results.