This paper is concerned with the estimation of radio communication distance when both the transmitter and receiver are arbitrarily distributed on a random rough surface such as desert, terrain, sea surface and so on. First, we simulate electromagnetic wave propagation along the rough surface by using the discrete ray tracing method (DRTM) proposed by authors recently. Second, we determine three parameters by conjugate gradient method (CGM) combined with the method of least-squares. Finally, we derive an analytical expression which can estimate the maximum communication distance when the input power of a transmitter and the minimum detectable electric intensity of a receiver are specified. Random rough surfaces are assumed to be Gaussian, pn-th order power law or exponential distributions.

Satellite communication can be operated with various levels of on-board processing in order to transmit the signal effectively. In this paper, the BER performances of the bent pipe transponder (BPT), dehop only transponder (DOT) and dehop and rehop transponder (DRT) systems with FH-MFSK modulation are investigated in the presence of broad band interference, narrow band interference and tone-type interference. In this case, the BER performances are compared for the variants of the data rates, spreading bandwidth and interference power. The numerical results show that DRT outperforms BPT and DOT. DOT is less sensitive to uplink interference power under broad band interference environment than DRT. In the case of narrow band interference, the DRT system is more sensitive to ρ value, i.e., the ratio of the interference bandwidth to the spreading bandwidth, than DOT. Among various interference types, the performance in n = 1 band multi-tone interference is shown to be the worst.