Alphasat propagation experiment in Madrid: Processing of the first year of measurements

Abstract

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) is participating in the Alphasat propagation experiment by measuring the copolar level of the Q-Band beacon at 39.4 GHz. In this paper the processing procedures are discussed and exemplified by their application to the first year of measurements (April 2014 to March 2015). In the first phase (data pre-processing), daily files of normalized duration are developed and a flag vector is generated. Excess attenuation and total attenuation are separately calculated in the following processing phases. The reference level is calculated on an event-by-event basis in the first case, and obtained from GNSS-based gas attenuation in the second one. The different procedures are described and some examples of events are presented together with statistics of the first year of measurements.