Reference antenna techniques for canceling radio frequency interference due to moving sources

TL;DR

This paper compares time domain and frequency domain reference antenna techniques for canceling radio frequency interference from moving sources, demonstrating effective interference removal in both methods.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of adaptive noise canceling and postcorrelation canceling for moving RFI sources, highlighting their advantages and limitations.

Findings

Both methods achieve complete interference cancellation.

Time domain cancelers adapt to phase changes, reducing decorrelation issues.

Postcorrelation cancelers are effective on longer timescales but sensitive to source movement.

Abstract

We investigate characteristics of radio frequency interference (RFI) signals that can affect the excision potential of some interference mitigation algorithms. The techniques considered are those that modify signals from auxiliary reference antennas to model and cancel interference from an astronomical observation. These techniques can be applied in the time domain, where the RFI voltage is modeled and subtracted from the astronomy signal path (adaptive noise canceling), or they can be applied to the autocorrelated and cross-correlated voltage spectra in the frequency domain (postcorrelation canceling). For ideal receivers and a single, statistically stationary interfering signal, both precorrelation and postcorrelation filters can result in complete cancellation of the interference from the observation. The postcorrelation method has the advantage of being applied on tens or hundreds of millisecond timescales rather than tens or hundreds of nanosecond timescales. However, this can be a disadvantage if the RFI transmitter location is changing, since the cross-correlated power measurements which link the interference power in the astronomy and reference signal paths can decorrelate. If the decorrelation is not too severe, it can be allowed for, at the expense of a noise increase. The time domain adaptive cancelers are allowed to slightly vary their internal coefficients and adapt to changing phases during the integrations, which means that they avoid the decorrelation problem. However, the freedom to adapt also results in a noise increase. In this paper the ability of both types of cancelers to excise interference originating from a moving source is compared. The cancelers perform well on both observed and simulated data, giving complete cancellation.