Fade and interfade duration statistics on an Earth-space link at 50 GHz

Statistics of fade and interfade duration have been derived from 1 year of slant path attenuation measurements at 50 GHz. It is shown that the normalised number of fades is almost independent of the attenuation threshold, while the opposite is observed for interfades. Fades and interfades of short duration, mainly because of scintillation, can be well represented by power-law distributions. Medium and long events, which are related to precipitation and clouds, follow log-normal distributions. The ITU-R model for fade duration performs reasonably well when compared with the experimental data.