An end-to-end radio interference monitoring system
Date
2026
Authors
Bruce, Nicholas
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Abstract
This dissertation presents the design, implementation, and philosophy of an end-to-end radio frequency interference monitoring system designed primarily for radio astronomy observatories. Motivated by the growing density of anthropogenic emitters and the corresponding threat to ground-based radio astronomy, the work describes a modular monitoring pipeline that includes hardware, signal processing, and machine learning. This work introduces several novelties: a gain-stable wideband receiver providing calibrated long-term radio frequency environment comparisons, a direction-of-arrival estimation method allowing use of arbitrarily arranged antennas, a digital down-converter architecture enabling insight into individual signal detections, and an unsupervised learning framework to perform modulation recognition and novelty detection. The dissertation also emphasizes the importance of modular, software-defined architectures and outlines future work towards real-time algorithms for next-generation interference management.
Description
Keywords
radio frequency interference, radio receiver, software defined radio, digital signal processing, machine learning, direction-of-arrival estimation, radio environment, radio astronomy