Preliminary Results from The ASI and NASA Alphasat Experimental Equipment

Notwithstanding the inherent advantages offered by service coverage over continental areas, modern and near future satellite-based solutions for broadband telecommunications must compete with high data rate services made available by terrestrial networks. To this aim, extremely high capacity is required, which can be achieved by shifting the operative frequency to higher carriers in the Ka and Q/V bands (and even beyond to the W band) inherently offering very large bandwidth. The main disadvantage of this approach is due to the strong detrimental effects induced by the atmosphere on electromagnetic waves. This calls for a design of advanced satellite communication systems that must make extensive use of Fade Mitigation Techniques (FMT), such as LPC (Link Power Control), site diversity or on-board adaptive power allocation, from the propagation side, and/or Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) and Data Rate Adaptation (DRA), from the telecommunication side. The Alphasat Aldo Paraboni propagation experiment was designed and supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) (and implemented by the European Space Agency, ESA) to allow better characterization of the atmospheric propagation channel at Ka band and Q band. This contribution presents a full year of measurements (2015) collected in the framework of the Alphasat propagation experiment at the Italian ground stations owned by ASI (Spino d'Adda, Milan, and Tito Scalo, Potenza), as well as at the main campus of Politecnico di Milano (NASA equipment installed at the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria).