An RFI mitigation project at the Italian radio telescopes

In this paper we present the first results of a project aiming at the mitigation of one of the most pressing problems for observational radio astronomy in Italy and the cm-wavelength telescopes world-wide: the ever-deteriorating situation of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI). We illustrate the campaigns conducted at the Noto 32m radio telescope and the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) observing sites to monitor the evolution of RFI at these locations in the frequency range 0.05–40 GHz. A new FPGA-based spectrometer and an offline software tool for RFI detection and excision are presented and their performances are summarized.