SETI signal

While watching a TV show on the discovery channel or one of those 'learning networks' I came upon a segment that pointed out that once SETI did recieve a single, perfect transmission, exactly what they were looking for, but only for a moment and before they could track where it came from. Needless to say I was blown away (they showed a picture of the paper the recording had been printed on, right next to the occurence there was the word 'wow!').

I have developed my own theory about this. I think that we detected the first radio signal from a developing race experimenting with radio, which may mean that we'll be hearing their news and eventually be seeing it sooner or later.

Did anyone else hear about this?

 

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Seti Stupid!

Yes, and because the signal was never repeated; they have totally disregarded it.

 

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WOW

The "WOW" signal

http://www.setileague.org/articles/calibwow.htm

 

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That article says (I'm reading it right now) that it is nearly impossible to find the signal again.

 

Just a few others.. but nothing extraordinary:

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/~rme/wow.htm
http://www.bigear.org/wow.htm
http://www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/history/History10.htm

Peace.

 

My brother gets excited every time there's a large spike on the visual representation in Seti@home

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It will be a while until we find a signal of the type in contact. The problem is the fact that there are so many frequencies. We look for those similar to ours and all the constants, hydrogen, etc. This is beyond our present lack of equipment. To make matters worse, radio telescopes are massive undertakings and require rows to work properly. Maybe we can start a government project to stick dishes on roof tops in a great set of urban chains. Just a thought, not really any possibility.

 

SETI Signals

Didn't it turn out to be a pulsar? I have the SETI program on my pc here at home. Unfortunately, sometimes I can't get a signal from Arecibo let alone outer space!!! Also, who is to assume that an advanced alien technology uses "radio waves", we may well be looking in the wrong "room"?

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All the good ideas have been taken

http://www.skypub.com/news/special/seti_next.html

The above site discusses this topic, not in detail though.

 

Yo! Boris!

Thanks for that, book marked for later!

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It seems one of the problems is that the signals can be subdivided into so many different subbands. I think I remember reading at one time that SETI could record signals of upon of a million different channels simultaneously. And that it was still not enough to cover the total band spread. Then there is the interpretation of the data once received. SETI has had a ground swell of help through the "at home" program. Allowing it a concentrate on the acquisition of the signals and not so much the interpretation of the data until the "at home" processes have been run. I still question some of the basic assumptions made when processing the signals but have no better suggestions to offer in their place. And, yes, I do crunch SETI for the Sciforums Team.

 

Into realms of Sci Fi

Ghosting into the realms of Sci Fi for a moment - remember in Star Trek, the Movies? The had trouble understanding "vega" due to the fact they no longer used radio signals and "vega" which was of course Voyager - did!

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Teg,

This is actually something I have thought of before. Given the use of differential GPS, it is possible to position something, especially a static something, down to millimeter precision. It would be easily possible to create a bunch of radio antennas/receivers that used differential GPS to position the antennas. You could place a variety of antennas all over the place, each logging and time-stamping its position and time of signal detection, and you could potentially use a post-processing of the data to create gigantic arrays, which would vastly increase your signal to noise ratio on the signals you were trying to detect.

 

Write your congressperson!


P.S It's too bad nothing'll probably happen for awhile, this whole terrorism thing has completely taken over any action in congress, but I bet it would be fairly cheap to install small antennas on every household in america, as opposed to building more and more huge radio telescopes.

 

How true that profit drives much of our world. So a need to be satisfied, a profit to be made, and you have interest and preformance in the desired direction.

Maybe the stat's from SETI users could be used to show ground-swell support for such an idea.

 

This hamster’s first reaction was that home antennas wouldn’t suffice because the data recording and time stamping wouldn’t be sufficiently precise for radio interferometry. Phase is very important.

However several satellites could continuously transmit reference signals. Each home antenna could digitize and feed its signal over the Internet to a data collection site. The reference signals could be used to triangulate position, to provide a highly accurate time stamp, and to “clean-up” each antenna’s signal. With accurate position, time, and clean signal, interferometry should work.

 

Imahamster,

You could readily use the GPS constellation for such a reference signal, especially if you used the P(Y) code, although this is a military code and its use is classified. You could use the C/A code, but its resolution is much less. The constellation is about as synchronized as you could ask for at the moment.