Does anyone have experience modeling propagation loss over a real geographic area? (Longley-Rice, Okumura-Hata, SUI, COST231-Hata, etc...). I'd like to estimate the signal strength around a small geographic area (say <5 km radius) and then go out and physically measure it at a variety of points to test correlation.

The results may appear in a future AAC article series. Target frequencies in the ISM band from say 0.1-10 GHz (168 MHz, 433 Mhz, 900 Mhz, 2.4 GHz, 5.9 GHz)

1) Is there any free/paid software that you can recommend?
2) Is there a mathematical model that you believe is better than others (that I would then have to implement via matlab or mathematica)?
3) Is there a website or a person that you can recommend where I can begin my research?

I've found that it's pretty easy to go down a rabbit hole with this topic -- so I'd prefer people with first-hand knowledge to help guide my way.
Thanks,
Mark

 

My only experience was about 20 yrs ago. It cost a fortune and was suppose to eliminate site RF surveys.

It was a complete failure and cost the company greatly. Even on flat prairie.

Maybe it has improved by now. I stayed away from it.

Will be interested in your results. Good luck.

 

Well that's not encouraging. But it correlates with some of the first-order estimations I came up with today (that varied by 100 dB between models).

 

I didn't make a career of RF. There are RF experts on here. Maybe they could use drones for surveys now.

Stick around.

 

For anyone who finds this post in the future -- one resource I discovered during my search is https://cloudrf.com/ My preliminary impression is that it's very well put together.