Nicholas Bruce

Topic

An End-to-End Radio Frequency Interference Monitoring System

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Date & location

• Monday, June 22, 2026

• 10:00 A.M.

• Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Peter Driessen, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria (Co-Supervisor)

• Dr. Stephen Harrison, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UVic (Co-Supervisor)

• Dr. Timothy Robishaw, Herberg Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Centre, UVic (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Preshanth Jagannathan, Algorithm Research and Development Group, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Lucinda Leonard, School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, UVic 

Abstract

This dissertation presents the design, implementation, and philosophy of an end-to-end radio frequency interference monitoring system designed primarily for radio astronomy observatories. Motivated by the growing density of anthropogenic emitters and the corresponding threat to ground-based radio astronomy, the work describes a modular monitoring pipeline that includes hardware, signal processing, and machine learning. This work introduces several novelties: a gain-stable wideband receiver providing calibrated long-term radio frequency environment comparisons, a direction-of-arrival estimation method allowing use of arbitrarily arranged antennas, a digital down-converter architecture enabling insight into individual signal detections, and an unsupervised learning framework to perform modulation recognition and novelty detection. The dissertation also emphasizes the importance of modular, software-defined architectures and outlines future work towards real-time algorithms for next-generation interference management.