Real-Time RFI Detection and Mitigation System for Microwave Radiometers

Abstract

Microwave radiometers are very sensitive passive sensors that measure the power of the thermal noise within a determined bandwidth. Therefore, any other signal present in the band modifies the value of the measured power, and the corresponding estimated antenna temperature, from which the geophysical parameters are retrieved. Due to the high sensitivity and accuracy required for these instruments, radio frequency interference (RFI) is becoming more and more a serious problem. On one hand, ground-based or global RFI surveys are helping to understand the occurrence and types of RFI sources. If RFI does not necessarily affect the whole bandwidth, or it is not present during the whole integration time, the application of either frequency blanking, time blanking or signal spectrogram techniques can be applied. However, it would be desirable to apply techniques to estimate the RFI signal so that it can be subtracted from the received signal itself so that some useful measurements are still possible. Such a real-time system is currently being developed for RFI detection and mitigation. This work focuses however in the description and performance of a wavelet-based RFI-mitigation technique implemented in a FPGA hardware back-end. The interfering signal is estimated by using the powerful denoising capabilities of the wavelet transform, and it is then subtracted from the total received signal to obtain a RFI-mitigated noise signal.