RFI Mitigation with Spectral Kurtosis

Spectral Kurtosis is a statistical tool that measures the randomness of a data set. As a result, this tool can identify signals that deviate from Gaussian statistics, making it sensitive to man-made signals such as cellphones and radar. The Green Bank Ultimate Pulsar Processing Instrument (GUPPI) raw files from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) was used for this project. The Spectral Kurtosis Estimator was proposed by Nita et al. (2007) as a real-time RFI mitigation technique. We discuss our attempts of implementing this technique with archival data from the GBT and show our preliminary results from this project.