FM Band Channel Measurements and Modeling

TL;DR

This study presents field measurements and modeling of FM band channels at 86 MHz across different terrains, highlighting their large coverage and unique delay characteristics for potential use in future wireless systems.

Contribution

It provides empirical FM channel measurements and extends existing models to better suit urban, hilly, and rural environments for wireless communication analysis.

Findings

FM channels have large coverage areas.

Urban and hilly environments exhibit higher delays than existing models.

FM band can be useful for 5G supplementary links.

Abstract

As FM coverage is so ubiquitous around the world, several applications can be considered to better exploit this useful band. Thus, it is of significant interest to investigate and characterize channel properties of the FM Band for the potential two-way digital wireless systems. In this paper, we present the results of field measurements at 86 MHz conducted at Gebze, Kocaeli, Turkey. Through the measurements, some of the FM channel characteristics are identified. Measurements are performed for urban, hilly terrain, and rural areas. Our results show that the FM channel expectedly has a large coverage area but at the same time, it possesses large channel excess delays. While most of COST-207 channel power delay profile models are also applicable for the FM Band, for urban environments and hilly terrain environments, channel clusters and excess delays are higher than those of COST-207 models. As 5G systems aim to utilize lower frequency bands for supplementary links, FM Band can be considered as one of the potential bands and the channel models proposed in this study can then be exploited for performance analysis.