Fading characteristics of ship-to-land propagation channel at 5.2 GHz

To investigate into the broadband over water-wave propagation channel, the German Aerospace Center conducted channel sounder measurement where the transmit antenna was mounted on a ship and the receive antenna was located on land. Using this setup, measurements were performed at 5.2 GHz in C-band, with a broadband signal of 100 MHz bandwidth. To analyze the impact on practical communication systems, the measurement bandwidth is divided into 5 subbands, each 20 MHz wide. Small scale fading behavior is studied in this paper with respect to the signal at the first delay bin for each subband. The results show that the first tap experiences Rician fading. A normal distribution is proposed to characterize the Rician K-factor of the first tap. Although the K-factor shows a slight dependence on the frequency subbands, the K-factor significantly depends on the receive antenna altitude.