Records of a 4-GHz 42-km propagation experiment near Atlanta, Ga. indicate that a squall line of heavy rain along the path caused 7-dB rain attenuation and degraded the cross-polarization discrimination from 27 dB down to 9 dB.

This paper presents the results of a statistical analysis of diversity combining systems. Previous theoretical work on this topic often assumes that the input signals are jointly Rayleigh distributed, which may not hold for a practical fading environment. In this paper, we use a new formulation and analysis to show that the major results of previous theoretical work are actually valid without the restrictive assumption of a joint Rayleigh distribution. The statistics include the probability of fade, the expected number of fades per unit time, and the average fade duration. We also extend the analysis to include the effect of a dominant interfering signal such as the water-reflected ray of an overwater radio link. The statistics of diversity signals on these radio links are different and are not treated in the literature.