A 14.2 km licensed point-to-point microwave link between a water treatment plant and a downtown municipal building — a worked path profile and link budget, rain-fade availability analysis, frequency coordination, and tower structural engineering, all sized around one target: five-nines availability.
The project brief: a regional water utility needs a SCADA-grade data path between its treatment plant and downtown fiber point-of-presence, and fiber was priced out as too costly to trench. The design walks a real 14.2 km path at 11.2 GHz — a Fresnel-zone and Earth-bulge clearance calculation that sets the tower heights, a link budget that uncovers a receiver-overload risk the design has to pad around, and an ITU-R P.530 rain-fade analysis checked against that budget's margin — all built around a 99.999% availability target rather than raw throughput.
This module walks the whole project the way a real RF/microwave engineer would: the path profile and Fresnel-zone worked calculation that sets antenna heights at both towers, a link budget that has to account for receiver overload as well as fade margin, an ITU-R P.530 rain-fade availability analysis, the FCC Part 101 frequency coordination process that actually determines the link's operating frequency and polarization, antenna and radio equipment selection, and the TIA-222 structural considerations at each tower. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.