Abstract
A new simple model has recently been proposed for land mobile satellite channels. In this paper we study the second-order statistics of the new model. First we develop a characteristic function-based approach for calculating the level crossing rate of the new model in diversity systems, where the branches can have different fading statistics. Then we compare the level crossing rate and the average fade duration of the new model with measured data. Similar to the first-order statistics, our results show that the second-order statistics of the new model can be expressed in compact closed forms, convenient for both mathematical analysis and numerical calculations.