A method of detecting radio transients
Peter A. Fridman · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society · 2010
Radio transients are sporadic signals, requiring that the backends of radio telescopes be equipped with the appropriate hardware and software for their detection. Observational programmes for detecting transients can be dedicated to that purpose or can rely upon observations made by other programmes. It is the single-dish single-transient (non-periodical) mode which is considered in this paper. Because neither the width of a transient nor the time of its arrival is known, a sequential analysis in the form of a cumulative sum (cusum) algorithm is proposed here. Computer simulations and real observation data processing are included to demonstrate the performance of the cusum. The use of the Hough transform is proposed here for the purpose of non-coherent de-dispersion. It is possible that the detected transients could be radio frequency interferences (RFI), and a procedure is proposed here which can distinguish between celestial signals and man-made RFI. This procedure is based on an analysis of the statistical properties of the signals.