ABSTRACT
This chapter covers practical topics for the system designer including radio transmission through the vacuum and the atmosphere, antennas types and performance metrics in link design, major Radio Frequency (RF) components for transmission and reception, and issues in computing the radio link performance. It describes the structure of the microwave spectrum and the characteristics of the Earth's atmosphere that affect radio propagation. The chapter also covers the topics such as antenna basics, link power budget, system noise temperature, rain loss, atmospheric phenomena, radio wave diffraction, and multipath and mobile propagation issues. It explains the functional components found in typical RF transmitters and typical RF receivers. The chapter discusses atmospheric effects on RF signals due to attenuation by atmospheric gas components, atmospheric refraction, diffraction by obstacles and atmospheric scintillation. It helps the readers to compute a link budget that accounts for path loss, transmission Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP), data rate, and receiver figure of merit.
