PropCode1 Notes
Charles Rino
September 2010
1 Introduction
PropCode1 is a MATLAB implementation of the algorithm described in Chap-
ter 2.2 of The Theory of Scintillation with Applications in Remote Sensing by
Charles L. Rino, John Wiley & Sons IEEE Press, 2010. The algorithm sim-
ulates electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation in a two-dimensional medium.
A two-dimensional medium has no variation outside a plane containing the EM
source. Two-dimensional simulations are not computationally intensive and
readily displayed. More important, they provide a usable approximations to
point-to-point communication and remote sensing applications. Users may be
familiar with standard propagation codes based on the parabolic wave equation,
which is a special cas e of the forward propagation equation (FPE) described in
Chapter 2 of the book cited above.
PropCode1 was developed as a tutorial introduction to the FPE and propa-
gation phenomena that aect radio and optical propagation in structured media.
Both the deterministic and random components of the structure are important,
although scintillation refers to the random variation of eld observables. Prior
to PropCode1 execution it is necessary to dene the refractive index within the
propagation space, the excitation eld, the eld sampling, and the incremental
propagation steps. The setup utility, SetupPropCode1, denes these inputs
and stores them in a .mat le accessed by a GUI when PropCode1 is executed.
Setup .mat le names contain the date and time of generation as a unique
identier. All subsequent code output le names include the setup date-time
stamp. Display and analysis utilities use the same GUI to select appropriate
input les.
To summarize the PropCode1 execution sequence:
1. Run SetPath4PropCode1 to put main code and support directories on the
MATLAB path.
2. In the selected or copied example folder, run the SetupPropCode1* script
to generate *.mat les containing the variables required by the main pro-
gram code (now on the MATLAB path). The names of the *.mat les
generated by the Setup* scripts contain the name Setup and a date-time
stamp that uniquely identies the setup *.mat le.
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