A method of detecting radio transients

Abstract

Radio transients are sporadic signals and their detection requires that the backends of radio telescopes be equipped with the appropriate hardware and software to undertake this. Observational programs to detect transients can be dedicated or they can piggy-back on observations made by other programs. 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 here proposed 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.