Abstract: ‍ ‍This paper studies the channel characteristics between tactical mobile Ad Hoc network （TacMAN） communication nodes in urban battlefield environment. The channel measurements are performed at the very high frequency （VHF） band in urban areas. The measurement results show that multipath components exhibit obvious birth/death behaviors and non-stationary phenomenon in the region. Firstly， to represent the non-stationary， a multipath recognition and tracking algorithm is designed to estimate the existence probability of multipath components. Secondly， an improved tapped delay line （TDL） model based on Markov chain is used to model the non-stationary process of the measured data. Finally， the statistical model of small scale fading is chosen based on Akaike Information Criterion （AIC）. The bimodal Gaussian mixture distribution （BGMD） and Ricean distribution are found to be the optimal distribution for the first path and the strongest path of the channel model， respectively. The non-stationary channel model established in this paper can describe channel characteristics in TacMAN scenarios well， and provide reference for improving the performance of communication systems in related military communication scenarios.