The impact of wind turbines on microwave radio paths is a bit of a mystery. It’s often misunderstood. In this blog post I’ll provide a couple planning tips and some useful reference material. My goal is helping you make good decisions about how to plan for a successful coexistence of microwave paths and wind turbines.
I planned many microwave paths near wind farms containing individual wind turbines. I also investigated performance issues caused by the these spinning behemoths near microwave paths. When it comes to planning microwave paths over rural, flat terrain, you need to consider the possibility that wind turbines could be present. In addition, you need to have a plan if they are in the vicinity of the proposed radio sites. I found that following the recommendations below made it a straightforward planning exercise.
The presence of wind farms is obvious if you’re familiar with an area or personally involved in surveying sites. However, so much preliminary work is done from a distance and often without intimate knowledge of the landscape. The USGS is an excellent resource to identify wind turbines and wind farms. They even provide a Google Earth .KMZ file which helps quickly identify any wind turbines that might obstruct the microwave path.
There are three main considerations to ensure a successful outcome when deploying microwave in the presence of wind turbines:
The impact of the first two criteria is generally manifested as reduced received signal level (RSL) from the designed plan. This generally degrades throughput performance and sometimes causes bit errors. The third item, reflections caused by the moving blades, will generally be manifested by increased bit errors and perhaps varying RSL. Don’t let the fact that the blades are seemingly non-conductive fool you. They likely contain trace amounts of copper to assist in lightning protection.
Over the past twenty years a fairly substantial amount of empirical data was collected to quantify the impact of wind turbines on analog wireless systems in the TV broadcast and radar bands. Comparatively less work has been done to collect similar data for digital transmissions in the microwave bands. However, paths can be planned with confidence using the guidance indicated in these documents; Wind Farms and Microwave Links – Harvey Lehpamer and Fixed Link Wind-Turbine Exclusion Zone Method – D F Bacon. These documents describe the general rules for exclusion zones around the path and distill it down to simple parameters. Harvey Lehpamer’s recommendation form his paper entitled Wind Farms and Microwave Links generally recommends the following:
These are approximations that vary with the path distance, frequency of the radios in the path, and size of the wind turbine
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