In this paper, a general fading model for wireless communications is introduced describing the nonlinearity, and at the same time the non-homogeneous nature of the propagation medium. Namely, the a - lambda - mu - eta includes the a - mu , the lambda - mu, the eta - mu, the gamma, the exponential, the Weibull, the Hoyt, the Nakagami-m, the Rayleigh, and the one-sided Gaussian distributions as special cases. Field measurements and Monte Carlo simulation have been used to validate the proposed distribution. An outperformance has been shown among the widely known fading distributions by fitting to the experimental data.