Detection and blanking of GSM interference in radio-astronomical observations

Abstract

Radio-astronomical observations are increasingly disturbed by man-made communication signals, satellite and broadcast services. In particular, the GSM band is a highly saturated domain, full with interferers which are much stronger than radio astronomical signals. We propose a strategy to reduce this interference using its non-stationary nature. We describe a multichannel interference detector which enables us to reduce the interference by rejecting corrupted time-frequency slots. The use of multichannel detection greatly improves performance over previously suggested single channel detectors. This paper is the first to propose the implementation of advanced array signal processing methods for interference detection in radio astronomical observations.