Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Alan Turing Building, School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

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M. Caldas

MIEM, Dinatel, Sarandí 620, 11000 Montevideo, Uruguay

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C. Dickinson

Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Alan Turing Building, School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

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K. S. F. Fornazier

Divisão de Astrofísica, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), São Jose dos Campos - SP, Brazil

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C. Monstein

Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

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C. Strauss

Divisão de Astrofísica, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), São Jose dos Campos - SP, Brazil

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G. Tancredi

Depto. Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, UdelaR, Iguá 4225, 11400 Montevideo, Uruguay

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, and

T. Villela

Divisão de Astrofísica, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), São Jose dos Campos - SP, Brazil

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S2251171719400051Cited by:9 (Source: Crossref)

This article is part of the issue:

Special Issue — Interference Mitigation Techniques in Radio Astronomy; Guest Editors: Kaushal D. Buch, Albert-Jan Boonstra, Gregory Hellbourg, Jonathon Kocz and Urvashi Rau

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Abstract

The Baryon acoustic oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations (BINGO) telescope is a new 40m class radio telescope to measure the large-angular-scale intensity of H i emission at 980–1260MHz to constrain dark energy parameters. As it needs to measure faint cosmological signals at the milliKelvin level, it requires a site that has very low radio frequency interference (RFI) at frequencies around 1GHz. We report on measurement campaigns across Uruguay and Brazil to find a suitable site, which looked at the strength of the mobile phone signals and other radio transmissions, the location of wind turbines, and also included mapping airplane flight paths. The site chosen for the BINGO telescope is a valley at Serra do Urubu, a remote part of Paraíba in North-East Brazil, which has sheltering terrain. During our measurements with a portable receiver, we did not detect any RFI in or near the BINGO band, given the sensitivity of the equipment. A radio quiet zone around the selected site has been requested from the Brazilian authorities ahead of the telescope construction.

Keywords:

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