Abstract
Among other atmospheric regions, ionosphere, which is ionized region of the atmosphere, is considered to impose serious limitations on satellite communication. At higher frequencies, radio waves pass through the ionosphere and are attenuated due to the free electrons present in ionosphere. This paper discusses atmospheric effects on high frequency radio waves illustrating the attenuation and losses it may come across like attenuation due to atmospheric gases, rain, clouds, beam spreading loss and noise temperature. Data used to summarize the influence of atmospheric phenomena is obtained from ITU-R models and processed using MATLAB.