Eric's Weekly Post #3 (Warning, science enclosed. Do not fold or bend.)

Is there a weather radar near by? Perhaps your picking up sidelobes or back lobes getting into the sidelobes of the receiving antenna? Sidelobe poke through or sibelobe of a separate transmitter getting into the sidelobe of the receiver? I am not actually suggesting radar, but even perhaps unshielded equipment nearby?

Many years ago very quiet night I could pick up the airport radar at Lindberg Field (or possibly the North Island Naval Station) on my CB radio. Gotta watch out for those harmonics.

[quoteThe two liniear polarisations of each ALFA beam can be combined to give both circular ("helical") polarisations. SO we could do the s@h search on FOUR polarisations per beam to give 4 x 7 = 28 streams of data.

I wonder if a bit more programming for the data splitting could add searching the circular polarisations?
[/quote]

I would think that if we are looking for ET at these frequencies, that ET has the same issues with beaming a linear polarization from the surface of it's planet as we do from ours.

Because of Faraday Rotation, most space communications between Earth and something in space are circularly polarized, because circular polarization makes the effects of faraday rotation negligible.

I would assume that ET's planet has a magnetic field too that causes similar effects.

It's said that one of the very first Earth-Moon-Earth contacts was from Arecibo using the 430 MHz disc feed that no longer exists (the one the bad guy in that Bond movie gets skewered with).