Digital Radio Outage Due to Selective Fading-Observation vs Prediction From Laboratory Simulation

A statistical model (introduced in a companion paper) of fading on a radio path is used with laboratory measurements on a digital radio system to estimate the outage due to multipath fading, where outage is the time that the bit error rate (ber) exceeds a threshold. Over the range of ber of interest (10 −6 to 10 −3 ), the calculated outage agrees favorably with the outage observed during the period for which the fading model was developed. It is further shown that the calculated outage, when scaled to a heavy fading month on the basis of single-frequency, time-faded statistics, agrees equally well with the outage observed on the same path during a heavy fading month The agreement between measured and predicted outage substantiates the selective fading model. The prescribed laboratory measurements characterize the sensitivity of the radio system to selective fading. Thus, the methodology provides a useful basis for comparing the outage of alternative realizations of digital radio systems.