Innovations in instrumentation for RFI monitoring

Radio telescope sites, especially the two for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in South Africa and Western Australia, need to be radio quiet. Both man-made intentional transmissions (which we call radio frequency interference or RFI) and unintentional by-products, generated by electric and electronic equipment (referred to as electromagnetic interference or EMI), must be minimized in power and spectral occupancy as much as possible. Organization go to great lengths to create these conditions. In order to safeguard these conditions one must measure and monitor the interference environment, preferably with great sensitivity and over the same frequency band used by the telescope. We discuss the way monitoring was done in the past and provide an overview of a new project that has just started, to create an improved measuring platform. This platform is aimed to be state of the art, sensitive enough to track the interference environment relatively close to the low levels that the telescope has to deal with, and flexible to cater for the various use cases for deployment at or near the observatory.