ANGLE DIVERSITY AND SPACE DIVERSITY EXPERIMENTS ON THE SALTON BRAWLEY HOP

Space diversity and angle diversity experimental data have been collected over a three year period, using 64 QAM radios, on the terrestrial microwave radio hop between Salton and Brawley in southern California. Both measured data and simulations have shown that the performance of angle diversity systems depends upon the direction of transmission on the path as well as the polarization of the signal. While this may also be true for space diversity, the effects of a finite spatial correlation length and a small signal-to-noise ratio significantly reduce the sensitivity of space diversity to the direction of propagation on this path. Additionally, the performance of angle diversity is shown to depend upon the method used to implement angle diversity.