Speaker
Description
The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a NASA long-duration balloon experiment
with the primary goal of detecting ultra-high-energy ($>10^{18}\,\mbox{eV}$) neutrinos via the Askaryan Effect.
The fourth ANITA mission, ANITA-IV, recently flew from Dec 2 to Dec 29, 2016.
The most significant change in signal processing in ANITA-IV from previous flights was the inclusion of the Tunable Universal Filter Frontend (TUFF) boards.
The TUFF boards had a three-fold purpose: 1) second-stage amplification by
45 dB to help boost the $\sim\,\mu\mbox{V-level}$ radio frequency (RF) signals to $\sim$ mV-level for digitization,
2) mitigation of narrow-band, anthropogenic noise with tunable, switchable RLC notch filters and
3) supplying power via bias tees to the first-stage, antenna-mounted amplifiers. In this talk, we outline the design and performance of the TUFF boards during the ANITA-IV flight.
