Evaluation of PST RFI mitigation

Mitigation of RFI is one of the key risks to the PST.  The RFI mitigation design has been shown to work on comparable real-world data but has not yet been tested on data that is 1) fully representative of the RFI environment at either the SKA-mid or SKA-low sites, or 2) fully representative of the signal as it will be received by the PST (after upstream processing by the CBF and other subsystems).  Evaluating the proposed RFI mitigation on truly representative data will retire (or realise) this risk early, enabling appropriate design action to be taken if necessary.

A minimum level of completion for this feature would be to evaluate the performance (in the manner described in the "description" field above) of the reference SK flagging design on:

1) Idealised simulated data (as generated using a simplified signal model, adulterated with representative RFI); and
2) Actual data obtained from a SKA precursor instrument (such as MeerKAT)

This would ideally be supplemented by performance evaluation of one or more of the following:

3) Truly representative simulated data (as generated using the golden signal chain model, adulterated with RFI that has characteristics identical to that obtained from RFI use cases from the actual SKA sites)
4) Simulated data that includes a simulated pulsar signal, passed through a complete prototype PST implementation, whereby the effect on pulsar timing residuals can be evaluated
5, only if needed) an alternate RFI mitigation approach than the SK implementation