RFI Mitigation with BETA

The Boolardy Engineering Test Array (BETA) is a 6 antenna interferometer, with each antenna having a 188-element phased array feed at the prime focus. Here we attempt to mitigate the affect of radio frequency interference (RFI) by updating the beam weights using a projection algorithm applied to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bannister, K., Hellbourg, Gregory, Hotan, A.
Format: Journal Article
Published: 2016
Online Access:http://www.atnf.csiro.au/projects/askap/aces_memo012.pdf
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/73555
Description
Summary:The Boolardy Engineering Test Array (BETA) is a 6 antenna interferometer, with each antenna having a 188-element phased array feed at the prime focus. Here we attempt to mitigate the affect of radio frequency interference (RFI) by updating the beam weights using a projection algorithm applied to the measured single-dish array covariance matrix. We observe an astronomical source at 1225 MHz, which contains substantial interference from the GPS L2 band, and compare a number of different projection algorithms by looking at the affect on correlated visibilities, and on the resulting images. The RFI projection algorithms perform remarkably well, yielding a promising future for this technique.