Alphasat experiment in Madrid: modeling considerations on fade and inter-fade duration results

The Q-band Alphasat beacon signal is being received in Madrid and now three complete years of measurements are available (from March 2014 to February 2017). In previous works the characteristics of the experiment-such as experimental setup and data processing-and attenuation results have been presented. This paper presents fade and inter-fade results for the average year, a modeling process that includes a comparison against models and a fitting effort on fade and inter-fade distributions. From these, it is concluded that there is room for improvement for fade duration models and that inter-fade duration distributions can be well approximated with two lognormal distributions, for durations lower than 106 s.