Abstract

This paper compares predicted monthly scintillation means of nine scintillation prediction models to the monthly mean of the empirical data collected from the beacon receiver located at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). Tropospheric scintillation is a phenomenon where a rapid fluctuation of signal happens due to the turbulence at the atmosphere. The tropospheric scintillation models which use to compare to the actual scintillation data are Ortigies T, DPSP, MPSP and KVS. The ground station of the satellite system has a frequency of 12.255 GHz and elevation angle of 40.1° and the data is gathered from January 2002 till December 2007. The scintillation amplitude of each prediction model is plotted into graph and the percentage of error is calculated to analyze the different between the actual scintillation data and prediction model in Northern Malaysia. The findings show the Ortgies-T gives the best fit result among the others in Northern Malaysia.

Key words: Tropospheric scintillation, satellite, Ku-band.