Challenges:
Engineering services company Cerento turned to HTZ Communications to resolve an interference problem from a nearby wind turbine. The wind farm operator risks their turbines interfering on critical comms infrastructures, mobile, broadcast and MW links and other key defence equipment. Frequently, windfarm operators are required to undertake an analysis of the impact and provide mitigations as part of the planning approval process.
Approach:
Cerento operate a PTMP network in the 3GHz band and fixed services in the 6GHz and 11GHz bands. For peace of mind, they ran a coexistence analysis’ across all their services, making use of HTZ’s internal libraries of royalty-free map data and propagation models. By importing all the Gateways and subscriber locations into HTZ, they automatically modelled the PTMP network based on the best signal level considering terrain, clutter and building layers. This study looked at all the possible connections and threshold/KTBF levels. The wind turbine RCS was calculated automatically considering the threshold degradation (TD) values based on the shape and surface of the mast and blades.
Solution:
HTZ can model any technology from a few kHz to 1THz. Its built-in PTMP features simulate potential interference from the turbine into MW links in the 3GHz band and generate a CSV file with the results. The analysis was exported and overlaid on Google Earth for the end customer.
Additional features in HTZ include clearance analysis for the potential interaction between weather radars and wind turbines to understand the impact of wind farm masks, reflections on buildings, and turbines/blades on weather radars. HTZ identifies three interference criteria including near-field zone, diffraction and signal reflection.
Cerento:
Cerento specialises in the design and construction of communications systems and infrastructure. They manage various networks across the United States and continue to design and construct reliable networks for industries ranging from hospitality to oilfields.
