Excision of Distance Measuring Equipment Interference from Radio Astronomy Signals

Distance measuring equipment (DME) signals transmitted by aircraft in flight present a strong source of interference in radio astronomy bands around 1 GHz. In this paper, we present a method for greatly suppressing this interference without significant loss of radio astronomy data. The method exploits the known structure of the DME waveform to perform a time/frequency domain blanking on the aggregate signal. Results are presented that illustrate the effectiveness of the procedure. Efficient implementation of the blanking algorithm is also considered.