Authors: Anastasia Kuske (NJIT)

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is when man made signals such as radar, cellphone, bluetooth, and WiFi signals interfere with our ability to detect and analyze astronomical signals. This is important for radio astronomers to be aware of and try to minimize when possible in order to improve detection and analysis of signals. Spectral Kurtosis (SK) is a commonly used method of identification of these man made signals using the integrated power, the integrated power squared, and the number of samples. The spectral kurtosis function is given as SK = (m+1)*(m*s2/(s1**2)-1)/(m-1) where m is the number of samples, s1 is the integrated power, and s2 is the integrated power squared. This was applied to the Expanded Owens Valley Solar Array (EOVSA) data that was taken using the dwell sequence to focus on one band at a time from band one to band fifty-two where bands three and four are cell tower bands that are known to be filled with RFI. To determine the best flagging method, and, or, and average, testing and analysis was done offline in python with one minute iterations of data for each band. After determining the most efficient flagging method, the code was recreated online to allow data from EOVSA to be flagged with RFI if it is identified.