Figure: RFI monitoring and mitigation at Italian Radio Telescopes

In recent years, the impact of RFI has definitely increased at the Italian telescope sites, Medicina, Noto and SRT, due to not only its abundance at the lower frequencies and its recurring appearance at the higher ones, but also because of the more frequent usage of the Italian antennas for single-dish wide-band radio continuum observations. Moreover, the higher sensitivity of the SRT makes this antenna even more vulnerable to undesired artificial emission. For these reasons, in addition to the monitoring of the radio astronomical frequency bands routinely performed at each site by means of permanent stations and two mobile laboratories, the Italian astronomy community is making extra efforts to support the development of methods for the mitigation and excision of the RFI.

This work reports the results of a project for the RFI mitigation at the Italian radio telescope sites the National Institute for Astrophysics funded in 2013 for a two years span. The results of intensive measurement campaigns performed at the Italian telescope sites to monitor the evolution of the RFI at these locations in the frequency range 0.05-40 GHz will be outlined and an estimation of the RFI occupancy of the bands of the current receivers will be given. Moreover, a new FPGA-based spectrometer for a real-time mitigation and an off-line software tool devoted to the RFI detection and excision will be presented. Finally, the performances of these new tools during some tests performed at SRT radio will be shown.

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Oggi Astro Chiacchiere! è un incontro informale tra il personale dell'Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari        
(staff, postdoc e studenti), che ha lo scopo di discutere argomenti di carattere prevalentemente scientifico,       
tecnologico, informativo sulle attività dell'Osservatorio.  L'incontro si tiene solitamente il Martedì, alle ore 
11:30, nell'Auditorium dell'Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari. Per informazioni e/o contributi contattare 
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