An approach to analog mitigation of RFI

Among all noise sources present in wireline transmission systems we focus on one special type: narrowband radio frequency interference generated by radio amateurs (RAM) and broadcast radio stations. This disturbance, characterized by high power and narrow bandwidth, has the potential of overloading the receiver´s analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Once the ADC is in saturation, any countermeasure taken in digital domain will fail. A viable way to face this problem is cancellation using the common-mode signal as a reference. This paper describes in detail an adaptive, mixed-signal, narrowband interference canceller employing a modified recursive least-squares algorithm, which is split into an analog and a digital part. The mixed-signal approach enables the circuit to generate an interference-cancelling signal of several MHz while operating the adaptive algorithm at some kilohertz. Simulation as well as measurement results show a steady-state disturbance suppression of about 35 dB. The convergence speed is high enough to protect the ADC from overloading due to time-variant HAM interference