Ka-Band Tropospheric Scintillation and Simultaneous Rain Attenuation Measured over Rome with Alphasat

Tropospheric turbulence can cause significant interference to satellite communications systems, particularly during precipitation events. In addition, the rapid amplitude variations of the signal due to scintillation are even more pronounced when there is rain in the propagation path. Few studies have been reported on scintillation during precipitations. In this context, a better characterization of these phenomena is important for a correct optimization of the satellite link budget. This paper collects and analyses one year of rainfall measurements obtained by detecting the signal emitted by the Aldo Paraboni payload mounted on board the Alphasat satellite as an experiment to investigate the Ka-band radio propagation channel. The study focuses on the instantaneous relationship between rain attenuation and simultaneous scintillation. We found that the mean value of the rain attenuation and the corresponding mean value of the standard deviation of the scintillation are related by a power law. The characteristics of the experiment, details of how to detect rainfall events and how to process the data are also presented.