Hello reddit! I work with satellites professionally but im having an issue with one of our ground station antennas. For security/doxxing reasons I’m not going to post my exact center frequency and have hidden the values from our fieldfox intentionally. For technical purposes i will say its around the 2-4GHz range the propagation should remain relatively unchanged with this range.
Image 1: is 500MHz span with no amplification. Just the noise floor with a 2m reflector. Clearly you can see signals with marker 4 and 5 are quite strong. Our center frequency is marker 1 with marker 2&3 being the -3dB rolloff of our bandpass filter.
Image 2: still 500MHz span but with +30dBm of gain and no bandpass filter attached. While the RFI signals are outside our bandpass filter you can clearly see these entire noise floor is risen +10dBm. This is making it extremely difficult for me to have good SNR on our center frequency.
Image 3: this is 100MHz span with our bandpass filter attached and amplification on. While i dont see the RFI signals outside due to an operating bandpass filter im still getting an excessive amount of noise floor gain.
Im unsure if this station needs to be entirely torn down or if anyone here has any fancy techniques to reduce the noise increase from RFI signals outside our bandpass filter. Imagine having an infinite budget and access to custom made equipment. I have already ordered a custom bandpass filter with our center frequency shifted from center but this will likely result in the same condition. Im unsure if notch filters placed at both markers 4&5 would decrease the noise floor. Ive never experienced an RFI this intense. Im avoiding contacting the FCC since due to the location these very well may be military.