Draft revision of Recommendation ITUR P.docVIP

INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION RADIOCOMMUNICATIONSTUDY GROUPS Document AUS 1 3J/-E 26 March 2007 English only Received: 2007 Subject: Question ITU-R 214/3, Recommendation ITU-R P.372-8 United States of America, Australia DRAFT REVISION OF RECOMMENDATION ITU-R P.372-8 Combination of Radio noise (Question ITU-R 214/3) Introduction Section 8 of Recommendation ITU-R P.372-8 describes qualitatively a method for predicting the median and standard deviation of the distribution resulting from the convolution of two or more types of radio noise distributions. It is now known that this method is incorrect. This proposal presents a detailed description of a more statistically correct method for combining the various radio noise sources. Background Recommendation ITU-R P.372 is widely used in many ITU-R applications and covers the estimation of radio noise from natural and man-made sources over a wide range of frequencies. There are occasions where more than one type of noise needs to be considered because two or more types are of comparable size. This can be true at any frequency, in general, but occurs most often at HF where atmospheric, man-made and galactic noise can be of comparable size (see Recommendation ITU-R P.372-8, Fig. 2, 10 MHz, for example). In the existing method (Section 8 of Recommendation ITU-R P.372-8) for obtaining the median value and distribution for the sum of two or more noise processes, the resultant median noise power is given by the sum of the median noise powers of the individual noise processes. The standard deviation of the resultant noise is obtained by summing noise powers determined one standard deviation above the median power for each of the noise processes involved, and then subtracting the resultant median noise power from that result. The resultant noise is assumed to be log-normally distributed. Spaulding and Stewart (Spaulding, A.D. and Stewart, F.G., NTIA Report 87-212 An Updated Noise Model