The spectacular growth of telecommunication services together with the new philosophy of educations associated to the European Higher Education Area make academic community, professional associations, employers and other stakeholders redefine the study program of Telecomm. Engineering by (1) defining professional and academic profiles, (2) describing the objectives of the program as well as the learning outcomes and (3) identifying the generic and subject-related competences.
In a second step, the academic community will have to decide the methods, techniques and formats of teaching, learning and assessment (when required, the development of teaching material) and how to translate into educational units and activities to achieve the defined learning outcomes. This communication arises in this framework. The subject is related to communications via radio (wireless, satellites, …) Students must learn basic topics usually explained by magisterial lessons with a different method which takes account of:
a) Time constraints: the rapid growth of telecommunication implies new topics to learn by students in the same period of time.
b) New competences (learning to work in group, responsibility, communication skills, leadership…)
c) New technologies applied to the education.
They must learn how to evaluate the propagation losses due to: frequency and distance, the presence of hydrometeors (atmospheric gases, water-vapour, fog, clouds, rain…) and obstacles between the transmitting and receiving stations (“diffraction losses” : knife-edge, rounded-edge, spherical Earth…-).The calculation of these attenuations with these restrictions often requires solving equations that are complex and tedious. In order to avoid this and to facilitate the comprehension of the phenomena that cause attenuation, a free Java tool was programmed to let the user visualize the losses and its numerical values depending on the different variables selected. Java was chosen instead of other programming languages because it is very useful for doing high performance interactive programs owing to its platform-independent character. Furthermore, it is very suitable for creating distributed and user-friendly applications over Internet.
The Java Applet can be divided into five main parts. The first one is a menu bar with several options available for the user during all the time of execution. The user can choose among several theoretical graphs for all the types of attenuation which will be plotted in a new window. The four parts left are four panels:

-Panel 1 is an informative panel that indicates the kind of attenuation selected and the kind of path (terrestrial or Earth-space). It is also shown a scheme with the main parameters involved in the calculation. There is a button included that when is pressed, a new window appears explaining the meaning of the variables and results.
-Panel 2 is in charge of the graphic representation. There is a combo box where the user can choose among different graphs. When one graph is selected will be immediately visualized in a canvas below.
-Panel 3 is the main panel, where the different types of attenuation can be selected simply by pressing the tabs. Once the tab is selected, all the variables are updated and the panels are refreshed showing the information related to that attenuation. The user can interact by changing the values of the input parameters.
-All the numerical values are displayed in panel 4.