Satellite Communication

Satellite communication is not really a separate application, but deserves separate mention. In addition to transmitters being terrestrial, they can be mounted on satellites. Geostationary satellites are defined by their height (for example, 36 000 km) and their longitude. All LEOs (low earth orbit constellations) and navigation satellites are described either by the two line element method or for the GPS satellites by the data provided in the Almanac data sets. ProMan offers the possibility to define a time (UTC time) and a location on the globe (coordinates of location in an arbitrary UTM zone, based on WGS 84 coordinate datum) - and then the location of the satellites relative to this location are computed by ProMan automatically. Antenna gains for the satellite transmitters are considered in the path loss predictions.

The satellite radio transmission to the mobile terminal is strongly affected by the variation of the received signal power because of the presence of fading phenomena (large-scale fading due to obstacles and small-scale fading due to multipath propagation). Multipath propagation arises from signal reflection and diffraction on obstacles. In satellite communications, the received signal is usually the superposition of two components: a main path and a summation of time-delayed scattered paths.