Real time detector for cyclostationary RFI in radio astronomy

The negative impact of radio frequency interferences on the quality of radio astronomical observations is a matter of increasing concern for the radio astronomy community. The integrity of the data can be preserved by-detecting the interference in order to blank the receiver in real time. The proposed detector uses cyclostationary properties of the interference. It converts the known hidden periodicity into a periodic signal which can be easily detected. In this paper, the method is explained and simulations applied to typical interferences are presented. Finally, a dedicated hardware implementation using programmable logic array is proposed.