A Comparison of L-Band and C-Band Multipath Propagation at Edwards AFB

Abstract

This paper summarizes L- and C-band propagation data based on multiple transmit and receive antennas in the flight-line environment at Edwards AFB. The data show that for this particular environment, C-band propagation exhibits much less delay spread than L-band propagation. But C-band propagation is more susceptible to complete outages due to shadowing. The main contributing factors to these conclusions are the increased attenuation at the point of reflection at C-band and the fact that the same antennas were used for both the L- and C-band experiments. Consequently, the receive antenna beamwidths were different (the beamwidth was much narrower at C-band) and this narrowed the angular spread of the multipath components captured at C-band.