A Space-Diversity Technique for Mitigating Signal Fading in Radio Transmission

Despite over seventy years of broadcasting, Radio Nigeria (FRCN) network signals still have poor reception and sometimes total failure. Apart from the problems of attenuation, fading, distortion, interference and noise, which are age-long problems militating against the performance of a digital communication system, radio communications engineers also face some new challenges arising from bandwidth limitation, equipment complexity, power limitation, noise limitation and cost. These problems are often encountered in the design of any communication systems and arose due to the imperfect nature of the communication channel. Each attempt to solve the problems creates additional cost, resulting from increased complexity in the design or increased radio frequency (RF) power requirement. The diversity technique presented in this paper is aimed at solving the problem of signal fading and poor reception of radio signals. The results of the previous studies have presented space diversity technique as a good tool for combating signal fading in a radio broadcasting station, whose studio and transmitting stations are located at different geographical locations, by connecting multiple antennas at both the transmit and the receiver ends. Simulation was conducted using MATLAB to verify the relationship between antenna heights and coverage distance in the line-of-sight transmission. The results are in total compliance with the attenuation square law, which states that signal strength is inversely proportional to distance. CCS Concepts • Hardware ➝Integrated circuit ➝Interconnect ➝Radio frequency and wireless interconnect