ITS Releases Best Practices Handbook for Propagation Measurements
Behind every initiative to share spectrum are models of how radio waves in a particular band travel, or propagate, through different environments. How far will a signal travel before it becomes too faint to be useful or to interfere with another signal? What happens when a signal encounters a tree, or a hill, or a house? If we can accurately model how radio waves will behave, it can dramatically increase the odds that sharing mechanisms will work.
Accurately measuring real-world spectrum usage and the performance of spectrum-dependent systems is the best way to improve and validate propagation models. NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) has been a primary resource in designing and conducting measurement campaigns, applying its decades of experience to ensuring measurements are accurate and provide meaningful data.
Now, ITS is releasing a handbook of best practices for propagation measurements, outlining how to calibrate, document, verify, and validate these measurements.
This handbook – “Best Practices for Radio Propagation Measurements” – builds on working papers developed while ITS was working with the Defense Spectrum Organization (DSO) to help improve propagation models used by the DSO’s Spectrum Sharing Test & Demonstration program.