Computationally Efficient Near-field Radio Frequency Source Localisation

Abstract

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is an ever-increasing problem for remote sensing and radio astronomy, with radio telescope arrays especially vulnerable to RFI. Localising the RFI source is the first step to dealing with the culprit system. In this paper, a new near-field localisation algorithm for interferometric arrays with low array beam side lobes, is presented. The computational complexity of the algorithm is linear with search grid size compared to the 3D MUSIC method which scales with the cube of search grid size. The trade-off is that the algorithm requires a once-off a priori calculation and storing of weighting matrices. The proposed algorithm has the same accuracy as 3D MUSIC.