Simulating Spectral Kurtosis Mitigation against Realistic Radio Frequency Interference Signals
Abstract
We investigate the effectiveness of the statistical radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation technique spectral kurtosis ( $\widehat{{SK}}$ ) in the face of simulated realistic RFI signals. $\widehat{{SK}}\,$ estimates the kurtosis of a collection of M power values in a single channel and provides a detection metric that is able to discern between human-made RFI and incoherent astronomical signals of interest. We test the ability of $\widehat{{SK}}\,$ to flag signals with various representative modulation types, data rates, duty cycles, and carrier frequencies. We flag with various accumulation lengths M and implement multiscale $\widehat{{SK}}$ , which combines information from adjacent time-frequency bins to mitigate weaknesses in single-scale $\widehat{{SK}}$ . We find that signals with significant sidelobe emission from high data rates are harder to flag, as well as signals with a 50% effective duty cycle and weak signal-to-noise ratios. Multiscale $\widehat{{SK}}$ with at least one extra channel can detect both the center channel and sideband interference, flagging greater than 90% as long as the bin channel width is wider in frequency than the RFI.
- Publication:
-
The Astronomical Journal
- Pub Date:
- October 2022
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-3881/ac7e47
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2207.07642
- Bibcode:
- 2022AJ....164..123S
- Keywords:
-
- Astronomical methods;
- Computational methods;
- Astronomical instrumentation;
- Astronomical simulations;
- 1043;
- 1965;
- 799;
- 1857;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- Accepted to AJ. 19 pages, 15 figures