Abstract

Radio astronomy is the discipline dedicated to the study of celestial emissions in the radio band from a few MHz to 300 GHz. In recent years, spurious emissions from man-made devices that operate at these frequencies have made detection of astronomical signals difficult. These harmful RF transmissions are called radio frequency interference (RFI). One strategy to remove RFI is to apply spatial filtering using an array antenna. This thesis documents the development of a high-speed data acquisition system used to record data from 7- and 19-element phased array feeds. The system supports synchronous sampling over all channels and streams data to disk allowing spatial filtering to be applied in post-processing. The development of a time blanking RFI mitigation system was also developed as part of this thesis. Time blanking is a strategy to remove radar interference by blanking the time intervals corrupted by radar transmissions. The two blanking strategies are time window blanking and detected pulse blanking. This thesis documents the design and implementation of a detected pulse blanking system built using FPGAs. The system employs complex signal processing techniques to detect and excise radar transmissions in real time. This FPGA RFI mitigation system is the first to use a matched filter in pulse detection. Successful radio frequency interference mitigation is demonstrated by removing simulated radar interference from a sinusoidal tone.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2007-08-15

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd2076

Keywords

radio astronomy, RFI mitigation, radar, time blanking, FPGA

Language

English

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