16
Iridium: Characterization and Countermeasures
Patrick McDougle (Virginia Tech) pmcdougl@vt.edu
Steve Ellingson (Virginia Tech) ellingson@vt.edu

RFI from the Iridium satellite communication system complicates observations in 1610-1630 MHz band. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of Iridium downlink signal observed at 1624 MHz using coherently-sampled data from Argus, a 24-element array of broadbeam antennas capable of instantaneous all-sky field of view, currently operating on the campus of the Ohio State University. We consider the performance of blanking algorithms using single- and multi-element detection techniques. Because Argus provides fully-coherent array data, we are also able to explore the performance of spatial nulling.