Digital Microwave Transmission and Link Design

Digital microwave radio systems are extensively used for mobile backhauls, local, junction and trunk networks. With higher capacity broadband implementations such as LTE and WiMAX, microwave backhaul has gained renewed importance. Understanding planning issues such a reliability and availability becomes even more critical. This course covers all stages of terrestrial microwave point-to-point network build-out from initial planning and feasibility studies to system deployment. It provides participants with the theoretical knowledge and the practical skills for planning and design of a microwave link. Emphasis is given to practical guidelines and activities involved in putting microwave systems into operation. It describes the process behind planning and creating a business case for a microwave network, including the advantages and disadvantages, and includes discussions that will help executives to make an informed decision about whether to build a microwave network.

Expected Accomplishments
•Identify factors which affect microwave propagation
•Outline the general layout of microwave transmit and receive chain
•List the features of a next generation IP microwave radio system
•Interpret a microwave antenna radiation pattern envelope
•Compare and contrast the different microwave antennas
•Perform path profile planning from topographical data
•Perform link budget calculations
•Compare a pure Ethernet radio system with a Hybrid radio system.
•Explain how Ethernet traffic is handled by modifications to a legacy TDM (PDH/SDH) based microwave system ◦Describe how packet synchronization is supported
◦Compute fade margins based on Vigent Barnett and ITU Rain model
◦Conduct frequency planning based on ITU guidelines
◦Understand quality and availability objectives, metrics and methods used to improve these

Course Outline

•Introduction
a.Microwave Spectrum
b.Merits and Demerits of microwave communication
c.Application areas for m Microwave transmission
d.Path planning

•Radio Equipment Characteristics
a.Equipment Configuration (Indoor, Outdoor, Split)
b.Basic Radio System Diagram
c.Radio Modems and MUX (PDH/SDH)
d.Bottlenecks of TDM Radio
e.Ethernet Radio
f.Hybrid Radio
g.Transceivers and Branching filters
h.Frequency and Space Diversity

•Microwave Antennas
a.Antenna Characteristics
b.Electrical Performance Parameters
c.Radiation Pattern Envelope
d.Standard Parabolic, Shielded, Grid, Focal Plan antennas.
e.Radomes

•Microwave Propagation
a.Free Space Loss
b.Reflection
c.Scattering
d.Diffraction
e.Atmospheric Refraction
f.Atmospheric Absorption
g.Rain Attenuation

•Link Planning
a.Establishing Planning Briefs
b.Path profile calculations
c.Radio repeaters
d.Atmospheric Refraction
e.Calculation of Tower Heights: Fresnel Zone and Earth Bulge
f.Path and Site Surveys
g.Case Study

•Microwave Link Engineering
a.System gain and fade margin
b.Availability Models
c.Multipath fade margin: Vigent Barnett
d.Rain fade margin: ITU-R rain model
e.Protection vs. Diversity
f.Measures to overbuild a link

•Frequency Planning
a.Causes of interference
b.Interference conditions
c.Basic ITU arrangement of frequency planning
d.Frequency reuse

•Quality and Availability Objectives
a.Availability objectives
b.G.821 and G.826 performance objectives
c.ITU-R Hypothetical Reference Path
d.Causes of unavailability and short outages

Who Can Benefit

Professionals involved in the field of operation, maintenance and planning of microwave radio systems.

Related Training
•Satellite Communications
•VSAT Networks: Planning, Design & Implementation
•Wireless Technologies

Duration

5 days

Mode

Consultant led classes, tutorial exercises and Path Loss 4.0 Microwave link planning tool.

Prerequisites
•Radio Fundamentals (or have equivalent experience)

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