Study of scintillation and simultaneous rain attenuation with ITALSAT experiment at Wroclaw

In satellite communications at carrier frequencies above 10 GHz, scintillation when superposed to rain attenuation may play a significant role in determining the power margin, especially for low availability systems with low elevation angle and low gain antennas. The assessment of the linkage between rain attenuation and scintillation during rain are then necessary to better use a given system capacity. Matricciani et al. found that the statistical relationship between 1-s averaged rain attenuation (A, in decibels) and standard deviation (sigma, in decibels) of simultaneous tropospheric scintillation in 1-s intervals can be fitted by the power law sigma- = CA(5/12) derivable from a turbulent-thin layer model. This relationship has been validated by using high-resolution (50 samples/s) experimental 12.5 and 19.77 GHz attenuation time series recorded at Spino d'Adda (45.4 degrees N) in a 30.6 degrees slant path to satellite Olympus during an observation time of approximately 1 year. In this contribution we describe the analysis procedure we intend to apply to the time series which will be recorded in Wroclaw with italsat experiment in 1998 and 1999 to validate the turbulent-thin layer model in the case of smaller gain antenna in a new climate region.