At the Ku band frequencies, the signal is oftentimes influenced by numerous deteriorating factors like rain attenuation, cloud attenuation, and tropospheric scintillation. Among other propagation impairment, rain attenuation is the most common and critical, because of its effects on the transmitted signal. These include loss of signal strength at the receiving station, wastage of transmission power in a bid to overcome the attenuation. The need to mitigating the effect of rain attenuation of signals at this band by gaining the diversity and improving the factor is of paramount importance that is addressed by this paper. The improvement factor and the diversity gain needed to compensate for the attenuation were obtained from data collected from three weather stations in the tropical region, after which a rain attenuation model was proposed. The results obtained from the several simulations using different diversity gain in single site attenuation shows that there has been a significant decrease in root-mean-square and standard deviation as a prediction error compared with existing standard models. This model (site diversity prediction) was built with respect to baseline orientation angle, frequency of operation, site separation distance, and elevation angle, and it performed better for elevation angle, and site separation distance.

Keywords : Ku band frequency, Signal, Attenuation, Mitigation, Diversity