Point-to-point microwave link design, Fresnel-zone clearance and rain fade, and satellite orbits, earth stations, and link budgets — from backhaul towers to VSAT terminals.
This module covers two families of long-haul wireless links that share the same underlying link-budget discipline but face very different engineering constraints: terrestrial point-to-point microwave, where true line-of-sight and Fresnel-zone clearance are hard requirements and rain fade scales sharply with frequency, and satellite communications, where orbit selection trades latency against coverage and constellation complexity long before a single link budget gets calculated.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a Ka-band satellite downlink to a small VSAT terminal is almost always the fade-limiting leg of the link, and why a 60% first-Fresnel-zone clearance target matters even on a path with confirmed, unobstructed line of sight — the same worst-case-leg design discipline this module applies to both microwave and satellite systems.