Nature and Evolution of UHF and L-band Radio Frequency Interference at the MeerKAT Radio Telescope

TL;DR

This study characterizes the evolution and sources of radio frequency interference at the MeerKAT telescope using a probabilistic framework, revealing temporal and directional variations linked to human activity and environmental factors.

Contribution

It introduces a probabilistic multidimensional approach to analyze RFI at MeerKAT, providing insights into its sources, temporal changes, and impact on observations.

Findings

RFI sources include GSM, DME, UHF-TV, and GPS satellites.

RFI occupancy varies with time and direction, with notable increases linked to construction.

COVID-19 lockdown reduced DME RFI significantly.

Abstract

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is unwanted noise that swamps the desired astronomical signal. Radio astronomers have always had to deal with RFI detection and excision around telescope sites, but little has been done to understand the full scope, nature and evolution of RFI in a unified way. We undertake this for the MeerKAT array using a probabilistic multidimensional framework approach focussing on UHF-band and L-band data. In the UHF- band, RFI is dominated by the allocated Global System for Mobile (GSM) Communications, flight Distance Measuring Equipment (DME), and UHF-TV bands. The L-band suffers from known RFI sources such as DMEs, GSM, and the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. In the "clean" MeerKAT band, we noticed the RFI occupancy changing with time and direction for both the L-band and UHF band. For example, we saw a significant increase (300% increase) in the fraction of L-band flagged data in November 2018 compared to June 2018. This increase seems to correlate with construction activity on site. In the UHF-band, we found that the early morning is least impacted by RFI and other outliers. We also found a dramatic decrease in DME RFI during the hard lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The work presented here allows us to characterise the evolution of RFI at the MeerKAT site. Any observatory can adopt it to understand the behaviour of RFI within its surroundings.