Improving the Estimation of Attenuation in Q/V Band Systems With a Kalman‐Based Scintillation Filter

Abstract This paper presents the design and implementation of a scintillation filter by Kalman‐colored algorithm (SciFi), which is used to remove tropospheric scintillation in Q/V band total attenuation time series. In contrast to the classical methods using low‐pass filters, the SciFi algorithm allows to estimate both the attenuation, its slope and a confidence interval. Moreover, the linear observer structure of the Kalman filter allows real‐time operation. Therefore, the states and uncertainties estimated by SciFi can be used as input for fade mitigation techniques (FMT) such as adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) or site diversity (SD). In this article, a method to tune the estimator based on ITU‐R recommendations is proposed. Finally, some time‐series and statistical results of filtering on Alphasat experimental data are discussed.