An assessment of the performance of slant-path attenuation prediction methods in tropical and equatorial regions

As the demands for larger capacity and new satellite services increase, so does the importance of the problem of slant-path attenuation prediction at frequencies above 10 GHz. The authors present a comparison between the attenuation predicted by nine of the currently available methods, using point rainfall data measured at four Brazilian locations, and the attenuations actually obtained from concurrently performed radiometric measurements. These results constitute a first step towards the improvement of slant-path attenuation predictions above 10 GHz in tropical and equatorial regions.<>