Hand-held personal communications systems will be power limited and re
stricted to small operating margins. Limited blockage and multipath ex
periments have been used to develop preliminary fade margins and perfo
rmance specifications but these have so far ignored effects induced by
the satellite. The results reported here indicate that diurnal motion
of the satellite, or its corollary movement of the antenna can cause
signal variations in excess of 9 dB peak-to-peak for low gain antennas
. A preliminary finding is that close-in multipath effects are the cau
se.