I'll never understand why China spent so much time and money finding the perfect remote karst for radio astronomy and then built a radio-loud amusement park around it.
>FAST is also receiving an enormous amount of weak radio frequency interference(RFI). Machine learning techniques were used to mitigate the RFI collected by FAST. This observation served as a test observation and it demonstrated that the majority of RFI was filtered out by the machine learning algorithm and the signal ranking pipeline called Nebula is also compatible with the observational data generated from FAST.
> The Observatory polices the area actively for devices emitting excessive electromagnetic radiation such as microwave ovens, Wi-Fi access points and faulty electrical equipment and request citizens discontinue their usage.
Things like only diesel vehicles (at the time, curious if electric cars are allowed now) because regular combustion engines have spark plugs.
I also remember watching a program (NOVA?) where they were interviewing one of the people who as charged with identifying sources. Often they were faulty transformers on electric poles (which got fixed). One time it was a woman's elderly dog that had a heating pad that was noisy (that one he went out and got new heating pad and that cleared it up).
So is that algorithm the radio equivalent of adaptive optics? Measure the noise and subtract it from the signal? If it’s as effective as claimed, does that open up new areas for siting radio telescopes that might have previously been thought too radio-noisy?
FAST is just some 7km away from a city (Tangbianzhen 塘边镇), and is sorrounded by villages.
Human settlements are very radio loud. If they already can manage radio signals from their sorroundings, I don’t see why an amusement park should be any more challenging for them…
> I'll never understand why China spent so much time and money finding the perfect remote karst for radio astronomy and then built a radio-loud amusement park around it.
Because it is a prestige project for Chinese government. Any science coming out of that is secondary to that.
>FAST is also receiving an enormous amount of weak radio frequency interference(RFI). Machine learning techniques were used to mitigate the RFI collected by FAST. This observation served as a test observation and it demonstrated that the majority of RFI was filtered out by the machine learning algorithm and the signal ranking pipeline called Nebula is also compatible with the observational data generated from FAST.