An empirical study of radio propagation aboard naval vessels

Most existing studies of indoor radio wave propagation have addressed operations in common commercial environments such as warehouses, office buildings and factories. These studies show typical path loss gradients ranging from 3-5, and rms delay spreads ranging from 10-40 nanoseconds. This paper reports the results of research conducted to characterize microwave radio propagation aboard Navy ships. Because of its principally steel construction, the ship environment displays significantly different characteristics from commercial environments. In particular, rms delay spreads ranging between 70 and 90 nanoseconds are common. Likewise, path loss gradients are observed to range from slightly greater than inverse square to smaller than unity. These effects of path loss and delay spread are found to be independent of frequency, over the range from 800 MHz to 2.6 GHz.