Digital back-end for RFI detection and mitigation in microwave radiometers

Radio-frequency interference (RFI) is a serious problem in microwave radiometry. In order to process the received data in real time, a powerful back-end for RFI detection and mitigation system must be implemented. This system includes many techniques against RFI, like time, frequency domain and spectrogram analysis. A wavelet-based RFI-mitigation technique is implemented in hardware. The interfering signal is estimated by using the powerful denoising capabilities of the wavelet transform. Then, this estimate of the RFI signal is subtracted from the total received signal to obtain a RFI-mitigated noise signal. Statistical analysis helps to validate the mentioned methods.