Reference antenna-based subspace tracking for RFI mitigation in radio astronomy

Abstract

Interference mitigation is becoming necessary to make radio astronomy work in bands that are heavily used to support our modern lives. It is becoming particularly difficult to work at frequencies between 1100 MHz and 1300 MHz that are rapidly filling up with satellite navigation signals. Antenna array radio telescopes present the possibility of applying spatial Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) mitigation. Spatial filtering techniques for RFI mitigation have been introduced to radio astronomy in the last decades. The success of these techniques relies on accurately estimating the RFI spatial signature (or RFI subspace). The use of a reference antenna steering at the RFI sources provides a good estimation of the RFI subspace when correlated with an array radio telescope. However, predicting the evolution of this subspace with time is necessary in a multiple RFI scenario, when only a single RFI source can be monitored at a time with the reference antenna. This paper introduces a subspace tracking approach, based on the power method applied to covariance data. The RFI spatial signature estimates provided by the reference antenna are used to initialize the power method to support a faster convergence. Practical examples are shown, applying the method to real data from a single 188 element phased array feed designed for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.