Multipath effects due to rain at 30-50 GHz frequency communication links

This study makes predictions about signal degradation along terrestrial radio links, operated at wide bandwidth and 30-50 GHz frequencies, caused by inhomogeneities in fairly severe rain storms. While the line-of-sight path may experience moderate to severe attenuation, the real problem at hand is to estimate the effect of multipath via scatterings from rain drops on side paths. These longer-path contributions can cause pulse distortions and related high-bandwidth effects which are deleterious to the information content, even upon successful reception of attenuated signals. Our results show that significant degradation of high-bandwidth signals accompanying attenuations of more than approximately 40 dB are possible under intermittent rainfall conditions.