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Abstract Diffuse radio recombination lines (RRLs) in the Galaxy are possible foregrounds for redshifted 21 cm experiments. We use EDGES drift scans centered at −26.°7 decl. to characterize diffuse RRLs across the southern sky. We find that RRLs averaged over the large antenna beam (72° × 110°) reach minimum amplitudes of R.A. = 2–6 hr. In this region, the Cαabsorption amplitude is 33 ± 11 mK (1σ) averaged over 50–87 MHz (27 ≳z≳ 15 for the 21 cm line) and increases strongly as frequency decreases. Cβand Hαlines are consistent with no detection with amplitudes of 13 ± 14 and 12 ± 10 mK (1σ), respectively. At 108–124.5 MHz (z≈ 11) in the same region, we find no evidence for carbon or hydrogen lines at the noise level of 3.4 mK (1σ). Conservatively assuming that observed lines come broadly from the diffuse interstellar medium, as opposed to a few compact regions, these amplitudes provide upper limits on the intrinsic diffuse lines. The observations support expectations that Galactic RRLs can be neglected as significant foregrounds for a large region of sky until redshifted 21 cm experiments, particularly those targeting cosmic dawn, move beyond the detection phase. We fit models of the spectral dependence of the lines averaged over the large beam of EDGES, which may contain multiple line sources with possible line blending, and find that including degrees of freedom for expected smooth, frequency-dependent deviations from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) is preferred over simple LTE assumptions for Cαand Hαlines. For Cαwe estimate departure coefficients 0.79 <b_nβ_n< 4.5 along the inner Galactic plane and 0 <b_nβ_n< 2.3 away from the inner Galactic plane. 

ABSTRACT Accurately accounting for spectral structure in spectrometer data induced by instrumental chromaticity on scales relevant for detection of the 21-cm signal is among the most significant challenges in global 21-cm signal analysis. In the publicly available Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Reionization Signature low-band data set, this complicating structure is suppressed using beam-factor-based chromaticity correction (BFCC), which works by dividing the data by a sky-map-weighted model of the spectral structure of the instrument beam. Several analyses of these data have employed models that start with the assumption that this correction is complete. However, while BFCC mitigates the impact of instrumental chromaticity on the data, given realistic assumptions regarding the spectral structure of the foregrounds, the correction is only partial. This complicates the interpretation of fits to the data with intrinsic sky models (models that assume no instrumental contribution to the spectral structure of the data). In this paper, we derive a BFCC data model from an analytical treatment of BFCC and demonstrate using simulated observations that, in contrast to using an intrinsic sky model for the data, the BFCC data model enables unbiased recovery of a simulated global 21-cm signal from beam-factor chromaticity-corrected data in the limit that the data are corrected with an error-free beam-factor model.