The frequencies of interest for redshifted 21 cm observations are heavily affected by terrestrial radio-frequency interference (RFI). We identify the McGill Arctic Research Station (MARS) as a new RFI-quiet site and report its RFI occupancy using 122 hours of data taken with a prototype antenna station developed for the Array of Long-Baseline Antennas for Taking Radio Observations from the Sub-Antarctic. Using an RFI flagging process tailored to the MARS data, we find an overall RFI occupancy of 1.8% averaged over 20-125 MHz. In particular, the FM broadcast band (88-108 MHz) is found to have an RFI occupancy of at most 1.6%. The data were taken during the Arctic summer, when degraded ionospheric conditions and an active research base contributed to increased RFI. The results quoted here therefore represent the maximum-level RFI environment at MARS.
@article{arxiv.2012.06521,
title = {Radio-Frequency Interference at the McGill Arctic Research Station},
author = {T. Dyson and H. C. Chiang and E. Egan and N. Ghazi and T. Menard and R. A. Monsalve and T. Moso and J. Peterson and J. L. Sievers and S. Tartakovsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.06521},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation