This book has grown out of my teaching and research at the University of Surrey and out of
my previous experiences in companies such as Philips, Ascom and Motorola. It is
primarily intended for use by students in master’s level and enhanced final-year under-
graduate courses who are specialising in communication systems and wish to understand
the principles and current practices of the wireless communication channel, including both
antenna and propagation aspects
The objective of this book is to allow the reader to predict the received
signal power produced by a particular radio transmitter. The first two
chapters examine propagation in free space for point-to-point and
point-to-area transmission, respectively. This is combined with a dis-
cussion regarding the characteristics of antennas for various purposes. In
chapter 3, the effect of obstacles, whether buildings or mountains, is
discussed and analytical methods, whereby the strength of a signal is the
shadow of an obstacle can be predicted, are presented.
With the rapid expansion of wireless consumer products,there has been a con-
siderable increase in the need for radio-frequency (RF) planning, link plan-
ning, and propagation modeling.A network designer with no RF background
may find himself/herself designing a wireless network. A wide array of RF
planning software packages can provide some support, but there is no substi-
tute for a fundamental understanding of the propagation process and the lim-
itations of the models employed. Blind use of computer-aided design (CAD)
programs with no understanding of the physical fundamentals underlying the
process can be a recipe for disaster. Having witnessed the results of this
approach, I hope to spare others this frustration.
The investigation of the propagation channel is becoming more and more important in mod-
ern wireless communication. The demand for spectral efficiency motivates exploitation of
all channels that can possibly be used for communications. Nowadays, a common trend for
designing physical layer algorithms is to adapt the transceiving strategy, either by maximizing
the diversity gains or by utilizing the coherence of the channels to improve the signal-to-noise
power ratio.
Wireless means different things to different people. For this book, it refers
to the radio systems that provide point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, and
Earth-space communications over transmission links that propagate outside
buildings through the lower atmosphere. Wireless systems are being built
that provide data transmission between computers and other devices on
one’s own desk. These are part of the wireless world but not the part where,
except for interference perhaps, the atmosphere has any influence. The intent
of this book is to provide a description of the physical phenomena that can
affect propagation through the atmosphere, present sample measurements
and statistics, and provide models that system designers can use to calculate
their link budgets and estimate the limitations the atmosphere may place on
their design.
This edition updates and continues the series of books based on the residential
courses on radiowave propagation organised by the IEE/IET.
The first course was held in 1974, with lectures by H. Page, P. Matthews,
D. Parsons, M.W. Gough, P.A. Watson, E. Hickin, T. Pratt, P. Knight, T.B. Jones,
P.A. Bradley, B. Burgess and H. Rishbeth.
Radio propagation measurements and channel modelling continue to be of fundamental importance
to radio system design. As new technology enables dynamic spectrum access and higher data rates,
radio propagation effects such as shadowing, the presence of multipath and frequency dispersion
are the limiting factors in the design of wireless communication systems. While there are several
books covering the topic of radio propagation in various frequency bands, there appears to be no
books on radio propagation measurements, which this book addresses at length.
One of the prerequisites for the development of telecommunication services is the
understanding of the propagation of the waves, either acoustic, electromagnetic,
radio or light waves, which are used for the transmission of information.
In this work, we shall limit ourselves to the study of radio waves: this term
apply to the electromagnetic waves used in radio communications. Their
frequency spectrum is very broad, and is divided into the following frequency
bands : ELF waves (f < 3 kHz), VLF (3-30 kHz), LF waves (30-300 kHz), MF
waves (300-3000 kHz), HF (3-30 MHz), VHF waves (30-300 MHz), UHF waves
(300-3000 MHz), SHF waves (3-30 GHz), EHF waves (30-300 GHz) and sub-
EHF waves (300-3000 GHz).