Up‐link power control of satellite earth‐stations as a fade countermeasure of 20/30 GHz communications systems

All 20/30 GHz satellite communications systems suffer from atmospheric attenuation in cloudy or rainy weather, particularly if high link availabilities are required. In FDMA systems the power transfer characteristic of each carrier is linear, so any up-link fade degrades the overall performance on a dB-by-dB basis. This, together with the fact that the 30 GHz up-link attenuation is much greater than the 20 GHz down-link attenuation, makes adaptive countermeasures of up-link fades most important. This paper shows how the overall link performance can be improved by applying up-link power control. It is explained how this improvement depends on the up-link/down-link balance, the dynamic range of the up-link power control, and the up-link and down-link atmospheric attenuation. If a small number of carriers can be allocated in an intermodulation-free frequency plan, the satellite transponder can be operated near saturation in order to optimize the down-link performance. Computer simulations of up-link power control for such an FDMA scheme have been performed based on measured three-carrier characteristics of a transponder TWT. It is shown that the overall link performance in faded conditions can be significantly improved with up-link power control. This may be utilized to increase the availability of a satellite link or to relax the earth-station performance in terms of G/T or EIRP if the link margin provided by an earth-station with fixed EIRP is satisfactory.