Preliminary Study of Hydro-Estimator Product for Microwave Links in Malaysia

Abstract

Radio links operating at 20 GHz or above tend to suffer losses, mainly due to hydrometeor particles in the atmosphere. This phenomenon also known as hydrometeor fades. The largest and most dynamic of these fading is rain. Rain fade can cause massive loss of signal for high frequency links. Optimal solution would be to use meteorological data that contains rain rate and convert it to rain fade for better network planning, simulation and deployment. This paper studies the possibility of exploiting Hydro-estimator product from NOAA that could be utilised for such endeavour. Rain rate distribution results from Hydro-estimator product are compared with ITU-R model and rain gauge for validation.