How is the building and terrain material defined in the Longley-Rice propagation model used by Antenna Toolbox?

How are the buildings defined in the Longley-Rice propagation model? Are they defined as PEC (perfect electric conductor), concrete, glass, etc.? Can this be changed? and how?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

Both building and terrain materials default to concrete. You cannot change the building and terrain material in the Longley-Rice model. The ray tracing propagation model is the only interface for specifying materials for buildings and terrain. These can be specified using the BuildingsMaterial and TerrainMaterial properties. There is a pre-defined list of materials that can be used, or materials can be specified using custom conductivity and permittivity values. For more details, you can access the release-specific documentation by executing the following command in the MATLAB R2020b command window:

>> web(fullfile(docroot, 'antenna/ref/propagationmodel.html'))

A featured example that explores setting building and terrain materials can be found by running the following command in the MATLAB R2020b command window:

>> web(fullfile(docroot, 'antenna/ug/urban-channel-link-analysis-and-visualization-using-ray-tracing.html'))

There is also a newer "Urban Link and Coverage Analysis using Ray Tracing" example that uses new features in R2021a. You might find this interesting as it is a faster ray tracing algorithm that enables modeling with a higher number of reflections.

Lastly, if you need to model additional material types for different reflections on a propagation path, you can obtain the output of the raytrace function by executing the following command in the MATLAB R2020b command window:

>> web(fullfile(docroot, 'antenna/ref/raytrace.html'))

Then, use the raypl function and specify ReflectionMaterials, You can access the documentation of "raypl" which can be accessed by executing the following command in MATLAB:

>> web(fullfile(docroot, 'antenna/ref/raypl.html'))

Please follow the link below to search for the required information regarding the current release:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/