An end-to-end radio interference monitoring system

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dc.contributor.authorBruce, Nicholas
dc.contributor.supervisorDriessen, Peter F.
dc.contributor.supervisorHarrison, Stephen
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T19:56:33Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T19:56:33Z
dc.date.issued2026
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering
dc.degree.levelDoctor of Philosophy PhD
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduate
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationN. Bruce, C. Baard, S. Harrison, M. Islam, A. J. Otto, D. Lagoy, R. Messing, B. Robert, T. Robishaw, and P. F. Driessen, “Wideband RFI monitor requirements, design, and commissioning at DRAO,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, vol. 138, p. 065005, June 2026.
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationN. Bruce, J. Stacey, and P. F. Driessen, “Visibility domain direction-of-arrival optimization for arbitrary 2-D arrays,” IEEE Access, pp. 1–1, 2022
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationN. Bruce, S. Harrison, and P. Driessen, “DDC Pool: Efficient down-conversion of signals for RFI monitoring,” in Proceedings for RFI 2022, 2022.
dc.identifier.bibliographicCitationN. Bruce, B. Moa, S. Harrison, and P. F. Driessen, “SigCLR: A contrastive learning approach to unsupervised modulation recognition and novelty detection,” in Proceedings of Radio Frequency Interference Conference — PoS(RFI2024), vol. 471, p. 025, 2025.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/24054
dc.languageEnglisheng
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Web
dc.subjectradio frequency interference
dc.subjectradio receiver
dc.subjectsoftware defined radio
dc.subjectdigital signal processing
dc.subjectmachine learning
dc.subjectdirection-of-arrival estimation
dc.subjectradio environment
dc.subjectradio astronomy
dc.titleAn end-to-end radio interference monitoring system
dc.typeThesis

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