As rays travel in the scene and bounce from surfaces, they lose their power, and their amplitudes gradually diminish. From a practical point of view, only rays that have power levels above the receiver sensitivity can be effectively received. Therefore, all the rays whose power levels fall below a specified power threshold are discarded. The '''Ray Power Threshold''' is specified in dBm and has a default value of -150dBm. Keep in mind that the value of this threshold directly affects the accuracy of the simulation results as well as the size of the output data file.
You can also set the '''Ray Angular Resolution''' of the transmitter rays in degrees. By default, every transmitter emanates equi-angular ray tubes at a resolution of 1 degree. Lower angular resolutions larger than 1° speed up the SBR simulation significantly, but they may compromise the accuracy. Higher angular resolutions less than 1° increase the accuracy of the simulating results, but they also increase the computation time. The SBR Engine Settings dialog also displays the required '''Minimum Recommended Ray Angular Resolution''' in degrees in a grayed-out box. This number is calculated based on the overall extents of your computational domain as well as the SBR mesh resolution. To see this value, you have to generate the SBR mesh first. Keeping the angular resolution of your project above this threshold value makes sure that the small mesh facets at very large distances from the source would not miss any impinging ray tubes during the simulation.
EM.Terrano gives a few more options for the ray tracing solution of your propagation problem. For instance, it allows you to exclude the direct line-of-sight (LOS) rays from the final solution. There is a check box for this purpose labeled "Exclude direct (LOS) rays from the solution", which is unchecked by default. EM.Terrano also allows you to superpose the received rays incoherently. In that case, the powers of individual ray are simply added to compute that total received power. This option in the check box labeled "Superpose rays incoherently" is disabled by default, too. At the end of a ray tracing simulation, the electric field of each individual rays is computed and reported. By default, the actual received ray fields are reported, which are independent of the radiation pattern of the receive antennas. EM.Terrano provides a check box labeled "Normalize ray's E-Field according to field based on receiver pattern", which is unchecked by default. If this box is checked, the field of each ray is normalized so as to reflect that effect of the receiver antenna's radiation pattern.
=== Polarimetric Channel Analysis ===