Improved Radio Astronomy Interference Characterization Using DevOps

Improved Radio Astronomy Interference Characterization Using DevOps

연구 분야: Software Development

학회: 2025 United States National Committee of URSI National Radio Science Meeting (USNC-URSI NRSM)

In order to increase spectrum sharing and protect Radio Astronomy against ever increasing Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), it is important to constantly monitor and analyze the radio frequency environment. This research improves upon a Software Defined Radio (SDR)-based testbed deployed at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory for over a year now with real time monitoring through DevOps tools. Utilizing Docker, Ansible, Prometheus, and Grafana in addition to improvements on the code created to run these continuous radio frequency surveys, measurements are calculated and displayed within seconds. Ensuring the health of these devices both from tampering and time/wear is also of utmost importance given the nonstop data collection. To that end daily status checks, alerting, and daily liveness checks have also been implemented. All of this ensures the constant monitoring of RFI is reliable, allowing for improved data gathering and analysis.