Even in clear conditions, free-space optical (FSO) links are impaired by scintillation and dynamic misalignment which result in a slow fading channel. This paper presents the first characterization of outage performance for single-input/single-output FSO links over exponentiated Weibull atmospheric turbulence and generalized misalignment. A novel feature of this paper is that a generalized pointing error model is employed which not only takes into account the impact of different jitters for the elevation and the horizontal displacement but also the effect of different boresight errors for each axis. The developed asymptotic expressions are used to find optimum beam widths that minimize the impact of pointing error effects in a variety of atmospheric turbulence conditions. Obtained results corroborate that the impact of generalized pointing errors is approximately the same over moderate and strong turbulence conditions when an aperture-averaged receiver is considered. Additionally, the use of a transmitter with optimized beam width can result in large gains on the order of 5 dB or even greater.
