Rainfall Attenuation Measurement at Ota, a Tropical Location

This paper presents the rain attenuation measurement carried out on an earth-space links, installed at Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria. The DTH downlinks frequency of 12.245 GHz from Astra 2E satellite. The cumulative distribution function for different rain attenuation events have been generated from the measured 4-year spectrum analyser data. The result was also compared with sixteen existing rain attenuation model around the world. The result shows that the average four year rain attenuation obtained at 0.001 %, 0.01 %, 0.1 % and 1 % are 4.66 dB, 4.01 dB, 3.31 dB and 2.51 dB respectively. The result of the study will provide useful information for microwave engineers for the estimation of rain attenuation on microwave links in Ota, southwest Nigeria which can be used to project for regions with the similar climatic conditions and calculate the best fade margin to mitigate the effect of rain attenuation to satellite signals in the region.