Above is a seven minute audio podcast in which Paul Horowitz talks about ham radio and SETI.
Podcasting since 2005! Listen to Latest SolderSmoke
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
The Art of Electronics #5 Paul Horowitz on SETI (and lots of other radio stuff)
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
SETI, Proxima Centauri, The Parkes Dish, and Intermodulation Distortion?
A cosmically interesting troubleshoot. But I'm not sure about their explanation. Why would the intermod disappear when they moved the Parkes Radio Telescope off of Proxima Centauri?
Sunday, December 20, 2020
The Parkes Radio Telescope Picks Up a Possible "Wow" Signal from Proxima Centauri (maybe)
An article about SETI and our favorite dish. From Scientific American:
Friday, November 27, 2020
6EQUJ5 -- SNR, the Big Ear Radio Telescope, and the "Wow" Signal
This Hack-A-Day article explains the significance of 6EQUJ5 on the paper readout of the Big Ear radio telescope. It is a signal-to-noise readout.
The article also has interesting information about the radio telescope that was used.
I have on my shelf John Kraus W8JK's wonderful book "Big Ear Two -- Listening for Other Worlds." John Kraus is the guy who built the Big Ear. In a reminder of how new radio technology really is, Kraus got his start in radio as a ten year-old boy in 1920. He ripped the wire out of the ignition coil of a Model T Ford to make a tuning coil for a crystal radio. He took the earpiece out of the family telephone. His father gave him a chunk of Galena. He used the crystal radio to listen to the early broadcasts of WWJ in Detroit.
Saturday, November 18, 2017
China and SETI: What Happens if China Makes First Contact?
Here is a really amazing article from The Atlantic. It is very thought provoking. Mind blowing. Strongly recommended.
You can read it here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact/544131/
Or you can listen to a reading of it (like a podcast) here:
https://soundcloud.com/user-154380542/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact-the-atlantic-ross-andersen
Thanks to Mike Rainey AA1TJ for alerting us to this.
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
A Signal for SETI? HD 164595
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Listening UP for KIC 846
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Real DX: The Mysterious Flicker of KIC 846
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Interview with Paul Horowitz (W1HFA) -- A Giant In Radio Electronics (Video)
I've been hearing about this book for years, but until I watched this interview, I knew nothing about the author. Thanks Lady Ada. (And thanks to Farhan for the alert.)
As a native New Yorker, I'm pleased to include in the blog yet another reminder that the Big Apple is not all fashion and finance -- a lot of solder has been melted in my home town.
Paul Horowitz has a truly awesome bio. He got his ham license at age eight. QST tells us that lots of little kids do this, but unlike some of the youngsters we see in the magazine I suspect young Paul really mastered the theory. Paul Horowitz has "The Knack." Big time.
PhD from Harvard. Author of "The Art of Electronics." Pioneer in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Carl Sagan is believed to have modeled the main character in "Contact" partly on Paul. Check out the wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Horowitz
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Monday, August 3, 2015
Amateurs and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Arecibo Birthday
Thanks to Bob Crane for this birthday alert:
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Thursday, June 13, 2013
LONE SIGNAL: SETI gets cool. Perhaps TOO cool! (VIDEO)
Slashdot alerted me to this new SETI-like effort to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations. It is called LONE SIGNAL. Check out their video (above and here:
http://youtu.be/M-XcrnSKUog )
http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/crowd-funded-radio-beacon-will-message-aliens-130612.htm
The project has many features that put it in the traditional SolderSmoke area of interest, especially "the use of a re-furbished radio telescope." But one look at their video (click above) made me think that perhaps these folks are just too cool for a project like this. I somehow can't see ANY of these people using a soldering iron. On the other hand, if WE had videos like this, maybe we'd be able to bring more young people into ham radio! Yea! Why can't we be cool too? How about it, ARRL?
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Friday, March 29, 2013
Wow! Great Article on the Wow SETI Signal
Thanks to David Umbaugh (and his son!) for alerting me to this really great article in The Atlantic on one intrepid amateur who has chosen to follow-up on the famous (and possibly extraterrestrial) "Wow" signal. You will like this article.
http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/the-wow-signal-one-mans-search-for-setis-most-tantalizing-trace-of-alien-life/253093/
Robert Gray's book is available here:
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Friday, January 4, 2013
Opening Scene of Contact (CQ at the end)
Mike Herr's video on his use of an Arduino to call CQ SKN made it onto Hack-A-Day
yesterday and provoked some discussion there of the meaning of CQ. One fellow posted
this opening scene from the movie Contact. I thought you guys would like it.
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The Allen Telescope Array
Jill Tartar of "Contact" fame is running this project.
Check it out: http://www.seti.org/ata
So, I'll be I'll be using a big array to listen (watch really) for the REAL DX on .5 to 11.2 Gigahertz. I'll let you guys know if I hear any "new ones"!
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Friday, March 16, 2012
SETI Live!
This is just the thing for those days when the solar flux is low and 17 meters is dead!
Check it out: http://setilive.org/
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Monday, December 5, 2011
Messaging ET (METI), and Silicon-based Life Forms
And then there is this article about silicon-based life forms. (At first I thought they were talking about us!) http://www.universetoday.com/91449/why-silicon-based-aliens-would-rather-eat-our-cities-than-us-thoughts-on-non-carbon-astrobiology/
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Can we put a Sputnik signal back in space for $300?
http://hackaday.com/2011/10/11/send-a-satellite-into-space-for-300/
We just make the antenna a bit longer and put it on 20 MHz. Or for a shorter antenna, 40 MHz.
Bert and the fellows out at UVA are going to take care of the whole SETI thing (Jerry, NR5A, was in the lead on this -- he started the SolderSmoke SETI-AT-HOME group). But we'll need some additional volunteers to cover the Low Earth Orbit portion of the SolderSmoke Space Program. And of course we have to come up with the 300 bucks.
Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Carl Sagan on the META (SETI) Results
I mentioned this in Ppodcast #138 and wanted to provide more info. Here are the relevant paragraphs from Sagan's book, "The Pale Blue Dot."
"Of course, there's a background level of radio noise from Earth-radio
and television stations, aircraft, portable telephones, nearby and more
distant spacecraft. Also, as with all radio receivers, the longer you
wait, the more likely it is that there'll be some random fluctuation in
the electronics so strong that it generates a spurious signal. So we
ignore anything that isn't much louder than the background.
Any strong narrow-band signal that remains in a single channel we take
very seriously. As it logs in the data, META automatically tells the human
operators to pay attention to certain signals. Over five years we made
some 60 trillion observations at various frequencies, while examining the
entire accessible sky. A few dozen signals survive the culling. These are
subjected to further scrutiny, and almost all of them are rejected-for
example, because an error has been found by fault-detection
microprocessors that examine the signal-detection microprocessors.
What's left-the strongest candidate signals after three surveys of the
sky-are 11 "events." They satisfy all but one of our criteria for a
genuine alien signal. But the one failed criterion is supremely important:
Verifiability. We've never been able to find any of them again. We look
back at that part of the sky three minutes later and there's nothing
there. We look again the following day: nothing. Examine it a year later,
or seven years later, and still there's nothing.
It seems unlikely that every signal we get from alien civilizations
would turn itself off a couple of minutes after we begin listening, and
never repeat. (How would they know we're paying attention?) But, just
possibly, this is the effect of twinkling. Stars twinkle because parcels
of turbulent air are moving across the line of sight between the star and
us. Sometimes these air parcels act as a lens and cause the light rays
from a given star to converge a little, making it momentarily brighter.
Similarly, astronomical radio sources may also twinkle-owing to clouds of
electrically charged (or "ionized") gas in the great near-vacuum between
the stars. We observe this routinely with pulsars.
Imagine a radio signal that's a little below the strength that we
could otherwise detect on Earth. Occasionally the signal will by chance be
temporarily focused, amplified, and brought within the detectability range
of our radio telescopes. The interesting thing is that the lifetimes of
such brightening, predicted from the physics of the interstellar gas, are
a few minutes-and the chance of reacquiring the signal is small. We should
really be pointing steadily at these coordinates in the sky, watching them
for months.
Despite the fact that none of these signals repeats, there's an
additional fact about them that, every time I think about it, sends a
chill down my spine: 8 of the 11 best candidate signals lie in or near the
plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. The five strongest are in the
constellations Cassiopeia, Monoceros, Hydra, and two in Sagittarius-in the
approximate direction of the center of the Galaxy. The Milky Way is a
flat, wheel-like collection of gas and dust and stars. Its flatness is why
we see it as a band of diffuse light across the night sky. That's where
almost all the stars in our galaxy are. If our candidate signals really
were radio interference from Earth or some undetected glitch in the
detection electronics, we shouldn't see them preferentially when we're
pointing at the Milky Way.
But maybe we had an especially unlucky and misleading run of
statistics. The probability that this correlation with the galactic plane
is due merely to chance is less than half a percent. Imagine a wall-size
map of the sky, ranging from the North Star at the top to the fainter
stars toward which the Earth's south pole points at the bottom. Snaking
across this wall map are the irregular boundaries of the Milky Way. Now
suppose that you were blindfolded and asked to throw five darts at random
at the map (with much of the southern sky, inaccessible from
Massachusetts, declared off limits). You'd have to throw the set of five
darts more than 200 times before, by accident, you got them to fall as
closely within the precincts of the Milky Way as the five strongest META
signals did. Without repeatable signals, though, there's no way we can
conclude that we've actually found extraterrestrial intelligence.
Or maybe the events we've found are caused by some new kind of
astrophysical phenomenon, something that nobody has thought of yet, by
which not civilizations, but stars or gas clouds (or something) that do
lie in the plane of the Milky Way emit strong signals in bafflingly narrow
frequency bands.
Let's permit ourselves, though, a moment of extravagant speculation.
Let's imagine that all our surviving events are in fact due to radio
beacons of other civilizations. Then we can estimate-from how little time
we've spent watching each piece of sky-how many such transmitters there
are in the entire Milky Way. The answer is something approaching a
million. If randomly strewn through space, the nearest of them would be a
few hundred light years away, too far for them to have picked up our own
TV or radar signals yet. They would not know for another few centuries
that a technical civilization has emerged on Earth. The Galaxy would be
pulsing with life and intelligence, but-unless they're busily exploring
huge numbers of obscure star systems-wholly oblivious of what has been
happening down here lately. A few centuries from now, after they do hear
from us, things might get very interesting. Fortunately, we'd have many
generations to prepare."
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