Dual-polarized channel outages during multipath fading

A statistical model is presented for the outages of dual-polarized-frequency (DPF) channels during periods of multipath fading. Estimates of outage statistics obtained with a variety of model parameters indicate that outage performance for current DPF channels during multipath fading is not materially affected by the system hardware cross-polarization-discrimination (XPD) as long as it remains above 20 dB. For a 0.02 percent two-way reliability objective for a 400-km route, and with a high antenna tower, the maximum reliable path length for a DPF channel is about 21.5 km for a bit-error rate of 0.001 in the absence of other outage effects, and for an average multipath environment.