It’s not quite the usual form of communication for amateurs, but an interesting experiment has been taking place over the past 6 months.
SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has been going on for many years. The problem is somewhat daunting. Assuming there is someone out there, how do you find them, when they may not even be trying to communicate with you? The answer is you scan the skies, looking for really really weak signals that are not natural in origin (and you thought QRP was hard)
Recording extraterrestrial static is not hard, it’s the processing afterwards that’s the hard work. A group of researchers at Berkeley University have come up with a novel solution to the problem, a screen saver that processes SETI data on you computer and reports back the results.
Since its inception in May over one and a half million people have downloaded the screensaver and have donated over 1.3 million YEARS of unused CPU cycles on their home computers.
The folks at SETI@home have tried to make the project interesting to all their unpaid volunteers. There are T-shirts, mugs, hats, etc available and people can form up in teams, much like contest clubs to combine their “scores”, or number of work packages processed. Each work package represents 107 seconds of a 10 KHz piece of recorded spectrum from the Arecibo radio telescope.
Go to http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and check it out. And join the Nashua Area Radio Club team (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_21772.html)
If your computer is the one that finds ET, the SETI@home folks promise that you’ll get co-discoverer credit.