Non-gaussian interference characterisation with application to current radio astronomy technique

Studies into the effects of coarse quantisation on the correlation function of astronomical signals have typically assumed that the undesirable part of the signal will be white noise with a Gaussian distribution. Due to the advent of the modem communications era, interference from man-made satellites has made it necessary to re-investigate these effects using interference distributions which are non-Gaussian. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the effects of a) an interfering sine tone, and b) an interfering phase-shift keyed sine tone, on the normalised correlation coefficients of both continuum and spectral line sources, before and after the application of a coarse quantisation scheme. It was found that the effect of this interference is to offset the unquantised correlation coefficients by an amount, which is proportional to both the interfering signal strength and the value of its auto-correlation function at the delay introduced by array geometry. The effect of quantisation on signals containing such non-Gaussian interference was found to be approximately the same as for the Gaussian case.