Performance of Recommendation ITU-R P.1812-3 Model in the Propagation Loss Prediction for Digital Terrestrial Television in Caracas (Venezuela) and Belem (Brazil)

Abstract

The successful operation of a telecommunication system depends mainly on a previous and suitable planning and dimensioning (P&D) of the same one. This process includes the selection of model to predict as accurately as possible the system propagation path loss, which is an imperative parameter in the estimation of his coverage. For the specific case of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), one of the more recently proposed propagation models considers a significant number of factors to estimate the losses, and it is the Recommendation ITU-R P.1812-3; however, its implementation has not been fully discussed in literature for regular broadcasting systems and even less for DTT. In this paper, the performance of above-mentioned model, for predicting propagation losses on DTT systems in the cities of Caracas (Venezuela) and Belem (Brazil), is evaluated by comparing model estimation results with field measurements realized in both localities. The performance is also compared with other propagation models by means of Mean Square Error (MSE). Results have shown that best results are obtained for the Caracas city.