JamesBrown

I would like to point my antenna at the L4 and L5 points. I know that they are leading and lagging the sun by 60 degrees so does that mean that I can simply calculate the suns position and then add and subtract 60 degrees? Sound to simple to be right. Regards....... Jim http://www.SETI.Net

My SETI station (http://www.SETI.Net) came up with a hit in the direction of the Orion star Nair al Saif this morning. You can watch the follow up here... Regards....... Jim

I went through an Astronomy class this quarter and realized that after fifty year out of school my math skills had gone the way of the Lindy (a very old dance) and since I want to understand what I read - its back to school for me. I decided to start near the bottom with on line math classes and simply go ahead with it as far and as fast as I can. Since the classes are on line with personal help if you need it you can bend your learning to your schedule. School is vastly different than when I went through college. Now days kids will simply not put up with the boring teaching we were subjected to. I will never again sit through a class lecture that puts me to sleep. Good luck...

Am I being super paranoid because our current government is so scientifically stupid and this isn’t helping? What? We live in a country where the vast majority of people mistrust science and scientists. This is reflected in pole after pole and the fact that the average citizen can be persuaded to vote against his own best interests because they will not listen critically to the scientific community. One of the reasons for this is demonstrated clearly in this press release. The average person… Hell not the average person 99% of the population reading this will assume that the Supernova happened just before World War 1. The only part of the population that will know that it happened about 500,000 years ago are those who have an understanding of astronomy. How many of those are there. How about on this forum? You are all people way above average in an understanding of science but were you mislead by this press release? How can we expect the informed citizens of the world to know what to think when they find out that the scientific community has *once again* demonstrated its disconnect with everyone else when it has to explain that it really didn’t mean 140 but 500,000. Come on NASA proof read this stuff

I can tell you, from first hand experience, why I haven’t found ET yet and I believe it’s the same problem with SETI@Home. I have built and now operate a waterhole SETI station (http://www.SETI.Net). It runs 7 X 24 (or as near as I can make it). I have been building the station for many years and now its on line. During construction I was busy with all the details and had not put much thought into the Fermi paradox which directly affects my small efforts. Now that the station is complete its time to do this thought process. I made a calculation on the number of ‘channels’ I had to examine on my station. Here are the numbers: Since you are all computer literate so you understand the concept of address space. If your computer has a gig of main memory and each address of that gig is a byte (8 bits) wide then you have an address space of 1,000,000,000 X 8 bits or 8 Gigabits. SETI Net has its own address space: The Paraclipse antenna is 12 foot in diameter. At 1420 MHz this equates to a half power beam width of about 3 degrees (HPBW). The antenna can be positioned in declination between -35 and +27degrees. Based on 3 degrees BW this is about 20 positions of DEC. This declination band moves past the antenna every 24 hours of RA (360 degrees of earth rotation). At 3 degrees this is 120 positions of RA. The Band Pass Filter (BPF) just after the LNA has a pass band from 1375 MHz to 1475 MHz for a total of 100 MHz wide search band. The Icom R7000 receiver running with the DRM module has an Audio Band Width of 20,000 Hz (ABW) So the address space of SETI Net is: (BPF/ABW) * (RA/HPBW) * (DEC/HPBW) = (100 E6 / 20 E3) * (360/3) * (62/3) = 12,000,000 channels to surf. I spend 2,000 seconds on each channel so: ~ 2.4E10 seconds or ~ 3,300 years to look ONCE in all my address space

Lockheed - The point is that there is no use in looking for anything OTHER than ourselves. There is no way we would recognize anything else. Radio or Optical astronomy are the only tools we have.

I thought you guys might be interested in my thoughts on the subject. ------------------------- After looking at the software and hardware requirements for my SETI station, and mulling over such technical questions as integration time constant and Doppler shift correction, I have come to the following epiphany: I must look for the most obvious signal - and that is the signal that I would choose to send myself, if I had the money to do so. What that means (and it seems obvious once put on paper) is that: I must look for myself Any ETI that I might hope to detect must be more like myself than unlike me, in most basic ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, for example, I think this ET would think in the same time frame as we do. Not at the speed of a glacier or at the speed of bullet, but somewhere near our 'thinking speed'. This is necessary to make the signal recognizable to us when finally detected. ET's physical makeup would have to be about the same as ours. Not as small as a bacterium or as large as one of the rolling hills I can see from my window, but somewhere in-between. This would give him the same type of control over his environment, and the same capability as I have to construct the needed transmitter, which could produce a signal which I can recognize. Not all ETI need be like me; only those who I have a realistic chance of detecting. ETI's transmitter must be an RF signal generator. Some other, more exotic form of communication may well be in use, but since I can't construct a receiver to detect exotica, it's not worth considering. This leaves open optical SETI - but not for me. I know nothing about the optics required on that scale. As a microwaver, I'll stick to the area where I have a shot at SETI success. The signal must be a deliberate beacon. That's the only type I and most other Argus stations would have a ghost of a chance of hearing. Leakage detection seems less likely, if only because of the transmit power requirements needed to show up on my system. Detecting planetary Radar also seems unlikely, because it seems that it would only be sent for short periods. Once a radar echo was recovered, the transmitter would most likely be turned off or pointed somewhere else. The modulation scheme needed for an effective Planetary Radar might also make it difficult to recognize on this end. I would set my beacon up in the waterhole to maximize its chances of discovery. I would want to be heard, and that is the most obvious place to start. The hydrogen line is at 1420 MHz and the hydroxyl line at 1662 MHZ. I would transmit at exactly 1/2 way between the two at 1541 MHz. (One could also make a case for the geometric mean of the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines, which is 1536 MHz. But we're splitting hairs here.) I would expect ETI to similarly transmit somewhere near the middle of the waterhole, if he wants me to detect him. Unfortunately, my Project Argus system (receiver and filter) can't tune this frequency, but if I were to make changes to my system, that is where I would choose to monitor. An ideal interstellar beacon should be narrow band to concentrate the transmit power, and to make it distinguishable from natural sources. It must be directed at our star. This is necessary to conserve power, and to make possible reception over huge distances. So a directed beacon is what I am looking for. I can see ETI pointing such a beacon at each candidate star, one at a time, sending the beacon for some length of time, and then moving to the next star. The above targeted beacon strategy implies that earth rotation Doppler compensation is a minimum requirement of our Project Argus receiving stations, if only to exclude local signals. Correcting for the Doppler shift due to our travel around the sun is also a requirement. I have the earth rotation Doppler chirp running now - the other compensation is an unknown quantity to me at this point, but something which Project Argus participants should be working on. My hypothetical interstellar beacon would be locked onto each star for about a year at a time. We may have missed ETI's signal already, and may have to wait another 300 million years for it to show up again. Or, it may be starting tomorrow. Since we just don't know, we may as well assume that it starts tomorrow. If I were sending a beacon, its transmitter frequency would be Doppler-adjusted to the Galactic center of rest. Since the purpose of a beacon is to be seen against a background of other signals, this would make it clear to anyone receiving it that it was an intentional signal. Again, I have no idea how to design this correction into my receiver chirp. If it's small (less than about 0.01 Hz/sec), no matter where I point my antenna I can't use it anyway, because my 10Hz/Bin resolution and planned 30-minute integration time constant make such small Doppler rates moot. If the compensation for the Galactic center of rest is a sizeable fraction of a Hz per second, I'd better figure out how to implement it! My beacon would be a CW signal on/off modulated in a regular way. I might send morse code in a repetitive pattern, and I would send it at a speed slow enough to allow integration of each character, but not so slow as to allow the signal to drift across many bins during a given key-down period. If I concentrate on looking for myself, I may well miss signals sent by those not like me. But I know that creatures who think like me exist (if only by Earth's own example.) Designing our search around those not like us involves pure speculation, and may reduce our chances for SETI success. ----------- Regards.. Jim (http://www.SETI.Net)