Fading Characteristics of the Land Mobile Radio Channel at 820 MHz

by

T. Anthony Knight

M. Eng. 1985

Abstract

The signal strength at a mobile receiver is a spatial random process, characterized by two principal components: variation in mean level due to shadowing, and fast fading due to multipath propagation. Random fading of the 800 MHz land mobile channel is studied, based on field measurements collected in the city of Ottawa, Canada.

The signal envelope was recorded in areas representing urban, suburban and highway terrain, and then resampled to remove the effects of the spatial shadowing and multipath fading processes were then estimated. New experimental evidence concerning the spatial correlation of multipath fading is found, which confirms existing theoretical results. Multipath, or fast, fading is approximately Rician in distribution, with parameters that depend on the type of terrain. Variation in the local mean due to shadowing is approximately lognormally distributed, with a standard deviation of 3 to 4 dB.

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