Enhanced Alphasat Aldo Paraboni Q/V Band Test-bed Configurations for Additional Experiments (CALIBRATE)

Future Q/V-band satellite communication systems will rely on adaptive techniques such as Smart Gateway Diversity (SGD), Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM), and Uplink Power Control (ULPC) to mitigate severe atmospheric propagation impairments that became critical as carrier frequencies increase. The evaluation of their performance requires realistic propagation datasets and representative system-level simulation environments. This paper presents the methodology developed within the ESA CALIBRATE project to construct a measurement-driven Q/V-band satellite communication Test-Bed for the assessment of adaptive control algorithms. More than ten years of heterogeneous propagation measurements from the Alphasat Aldo Paraboni, Astra 3B, and Ka-Sat experiments are harmonized into a unified propagation database and used to construct representative Gateway and User Earth Station configurations. Synthetic attenuation time series generated from ERA5-driven channel models complement the measurements to extend the temporal coverage and support a larger Reference System. The resulting framework enables realistic system-level simulations and performance scaling from the experimental Test-Bed to an operational Very High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) system.