ABSTRACT From January 2021 to December 2023, the Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) conducted a three‐year Earth‐space propagation measurement campaign in Guadeloupe. The experiment used beacon receivers deployed in Pointe‐à‐Pitre airport to record signals at 11.2, 19.7, and 39.8 GHz from E65WA satellite. A rain gauge was also installed on site to collect concurrent rainfall rate measurements alongside beacon data. The availability of the data is close to 100% for the first 2 years of the experiment and higher than 95% over the full duration of the experiment at all three frequencies. This paper presents an analysis of the collected data to enhance the understanding of propagation effects in tropical environments. First, the climatic characteristics of Guadeloupe are shown to contextualize the study. Second, the propagation experiment setup and the data processing methodology are described. Third, experimental statistics of rain attenuation and rainfall rate are provided. The results are compared with the prediction methods of Recommendation ITU‐R P.837‐8 (rainfall rate), Recommendation ITU‐R P.618‐14 (rain attenuation and frequency scaling) and Recommendation ITU‐R P.16231 (fade slope and fade duration) to evaluate their accuracy in tropical areas.
Monvoisin et al. (Tue,) studied this question.