Fine tune Lee model

Abstract

Both terrain contour and human-made structures strongly affect the received mobile radio signal strength. But it is difficult to separate the effects of the natural environment and human-made structures on the received data for two reasons: first, in a natural environment, the ground is never flat; second, human-made structures in each area are different. Finding the propagation characteristics, such as the intercept signal level at a given range (1 km or 1 mile away from the base station) and the slope of pathloss along the radio path, is a challenging task. This paper introduces a method that can separate the effects of human-made structures from that of the terrain contour with a high degree of confidence. The propagation characteristics differ for different areas, and the proper ones are used as valuable inputs to the propagation prediction software program. This paper also compares the theoretical shadow-loss and effective antenna height gain with the large amounts of measured data when a mobile is blocked or not blocked by terrain from the base station. Finally, this paper discusses a means of fine-tuning the propagation model on the terrain effect by feeding back the measured data.