Browsing by Author "Steeb, Jan-Willem W"
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- ItemLocalization and litigation of radio frequency interference for interferometric arrays(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-12) Steeb, Jan-Willem W; Davidson, David B.; Wijnholds, Stefan J.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Radio telescopes have increased exponentially in sensitivity ever since the first single dish radio telescopes were built in the 1930's. This trend continues with the development of next generation telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Parallel to the development of radio telescopes, has been the rapid expansion of telecommunication technologies. Consequently, radio telescopes are becoming more sensitive in an environment with ever increasing radio frequency interference (RFI). The ideal solution to RFI that is detected by a radio telescope is to locate its source and then have it removed. Removal of the source is usually only possible if it is occurring in a protected band or the radio telescope is in a radio quiet zone. Unfortunately, most of the radio spectrum has been allocated to active communication services and not all radio telescopes are in radio quiet zones. The alternative is to mitigate its effect using methods such as spatial RFI mitigation. The contributions of this PhD dissertation are twofold: firstly, a source localization algorithm that takes into account the constraints and advantages of the arrays used for radio astronomy has been developed; and secondly, existing spatial RFI mitigation techniques have been adapted to take into account the bandwidth of the RFI signals. The computationally efficient localization algorithm that was developed is best suited for interferometric arrays with low array beam sidelobes. Two variants of the algorithm were developed, one that works for sources in the near-field and the other for far-field sources. In the near-field, the computational complexity of the algorithm is linear with search grid size compared to cubic scaling of the state-of-the-art 3-D MUSIC method. The trade-off is that the proposed algorithm requires a once-off a priori calculation and storing of weighting matrices. In an experiment using a station of the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) a hexacopter was flown around the array, at a mean radial distance of 190 m, broadcasting a signal. The mean error in distance between the estimated position of the hexacopter and the GPS position of the hexacopter was 2 m for a wavelength of 6.7 m. The non-narrowband RFI mitigation method developed consists of a second order filter that is used to mitigate powerful RFI with bandwidth sufficient to cause aberrations that are below the noise, but with power that competes with the astronomical sources. The second order filter consists of a first order subspace subtraction filter combined with a flat frequency response model for the RFI source. Taking into account mutual coupling as well as a calibration step to account for unknown complex gains, the algorithm was found to process approximately 1.6 times more bandwidth than using just a first order subspace subtraction filter.