Detection of Radio Frequency Interference in Microwave Radiometers Operating in Shared Spectrum

Abstract

Microwave radiometers measure weak thermal emission from the Earth, which is broadband in nature. Radio frequency interference (RFI) originates from active transmitters and is typically narrow band, directional, and continuous or intermittent. The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager (GMI) has seen RFI caused by ocean reflections from direct broadcast and communication satellites in the shared 18.7-GHz allocated band. This paper focuses on the use of a complex signal kurtosis algorithm to detect direct broadcast satellite (DBS) signals at 18.7 GHz. An experiment was conducted in August 2017 at the Harvest oil platform, located about 10 km off the coast of central California. Data were collected for direct and ocean reflected DBS transmissions in the K- and Ku-bands from a commercial geostationary satellite. Results are presented for the complex kurtosis performance for a five-channel quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signal versus the seven-channel case. As the spectrum becomes more occupied, detector performance decreases. Filtering of RFI in the fully occupied spectrum is very difficult, and detection using the complex kurtosis detector is only possible for very large interference-to-noise ratio (INR) values at −5 dB and higher. This corresponds to over 100 K in a real system such as GMI; therefore, other detection approaches might be more appropriate.