Development of an On-Board Wide-Band Processor for Radio Frequency Interference Detection and Filtering

The demand for microwave spectrum for commercial and industrial use has been increasing rapidly over the last decade, putting stress on the limited spectral resources for passive microwave remote sensing. Radio frequency interference from man-made sources is expected to become worse over the coming years. At 1.4 GHz, the SMAP mission has implemented and demonstrated advanced interference detection algorithms for its microwave radiometer. This scheme will not be feasible at higher microwave frequencies (above 6 GHz) due to much larger radiometer bandwidths used and the limited downlink data volume available to implement RFI filtering algorithms in the ground processing. In this paper, we present the design, development, and test of an advanced on-board interference detection and RFI filtering digital back-end that is capable of operation for a 1 GHz-radiometer bandwidth. We describe the combined RFI detection algorithms implemented in the digital backend’s firmware and the on-board RFI filtering of interference-corrupted data that will be necessary to limit downlink rate requirements for future high-frequency microwave missions.