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Publication
Dynamic tunable notch filters for the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA)

Allison, P. et al., 2018, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A, 894, 47 | View on ADS (2018NIMPA.894...47A) | Access via DOI

Abstract

The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a NASA long-duration balloon experiment with the primary goal of detecting ultra-high-energy (> 10¹⁸eV) neutrinos via the Askaryan Effect. The fourth ANITA mission, ANITA-IV, recently flew from Dec 2 to Dec 29, 2016. For the first time, the Tunable Universal Filter Frontend (TUFF) boards were deployed for mitigation of narrow-band, anthropogenic noise with tunable, switchable notch filters. The TUFF boards also performed second-stage amplification by approximately 45 dB to boost the ∼ μV-level radio frequency (RF) signals to ∼ mV-level for digitization, and supplied power via bias tees to the first-stage, antenna-mounted amplifiers. The other major change in signal processing in ANITA-IV is the resurrection of the 90 ° hybrids deployed previously in ANITA-I, in the trigger system, although in this paper we focus on the TUFF boards. During the ANITA-IV mission, the TUFF boards were successfully operated throughout the flight. They contributed to a factor of 2.8 higher total instrument livetime on average in ANITA-IV compared to ANITA-III due to reduction of narrow-band, anthropogenic noise before a trigger decision is made.