Impact of OTS propagation results on the ECS system

Fade and cross polarization results obtained from OTS are considered along with other propagation parameters (scintillation, atmospheric noise) in relation to the design of ECS. Results support the proposed design, but improvements are possible in polarization and frequency scaling of parameters, model for ice only crosspolar discrimination (XPD) statistics, and attenuation/XPD joint statistics. Further analysis is required, since results show large variations between ground stations. For a detailed assessement of any given ECS link, a country by country scaling of statistics is needed.