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

• Main Authors: Allison, P., Banerjee, O., Beatty, J. J., Connolly, A., Deaconu, C., Gordon, J., Gorham, P. W., Kovacevich, M., Miki, C., Oberla, E., Roberts, J., Rotter, B., Stafford, S., Tatem, K., Batten, L., Belov, K., Besson, D. Z., Binns, W. R., Bugaev, V., Cao, P., Chen, C., Chen, P., Chen, Y., Clem, J. M., Cremonesi, L., Dailey, B., Dowkontt, P. F., Hsu, S., Huang, J., Hupe, R., Israel, M. H., Kowalski, J., Lam, J., Learned, J. G., Liewer, K. M., Liu, T. C., Ludwig, A., Matsuno, S., Mulrey, K., Nam, J., Nichol, R. J., Novikov, A., Prohira, S., Rauch, B. F., Ripa, J., Romero-Wolf, A., Russell, J., Saltzberg, D., Seckel, D., Shiao, J., Stockham, J., Stockham, M., Strutt, B., Varner, G. S., Vieregg, A. G., Wang, S., Wissel, S. A., Wu, F., Young, R.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2017
• Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM; FOS Physical sciences; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1709.04536; https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.04536

The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a NASA long-duration balloon experiment with the primary goal of detecting ultra-high-energy ($>10^{18}\,\mbox{eV}$) 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 $\sim\,μ\mbox{V-level}$ radio frequency (RF) signals to $\sim$ 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 $90^{\circ}$ 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. : 27 pages, 19 figures