Articles | Volume 16
https://doi.org/10.5194/ars-16-177-2018
https://doi.org/10.5194/ars-16-177-2018
04 Sep 2018
 | 04 Sep 2018

Spectrum management and compatibility studies with Python

Benjamin Winkel and Axel Jessner

Abstract. We developed the pycraf Python package, which provides functions and procedures for various tasks related to spectrum-management compatibility studies. This includes an implementation of ITU-R Rec. P.452 (ITU-R, 2015), which allows to calculate the path attenuation arising from the distance and terrain properties between an interferer and the victim service. A typical example would be the calculation of interference levels at a radio telescope produced from a radio broadcasting tower. Furthermore, pycraf provides functionality to calculate atmospheric attenuation as proposed in ITU-R Rec. P.676 (ITU-R, 2013).

Using the rich ecosystem of scientific Python libraries and our pycraf package, we performed a large number of compatibility studies. Here, we will highlight a recent case study, where we analysed the potential harm that the next-generation cell-phone standard 5G could bring to observations at a radio observatory. For this we implemented a Monte-Carlo simulation to deal with the quasi-statistical spatial distribution of base stations and user devices around the radio astronomy station.

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Short summary
We developed the software pycraf. It allows to analyse the compatibility between applications and services that make use of radio waves, for example mobile communications providers. The radio wave spectrum is very limited, which makes it important that devices do not interfere with each other. One major application of pycraf is to calculate protection criteria for radio astronomy observatories, which are extremely sensitive to man-made radio emission, potentially rendering them blind.