Jeff, Dan, and Eric worked together here and remotely at Arecibo to hook up a radar blanking signal in one of the empty channels on our multibeam recorder - it will tell us at very high time resolution when we are getting hit with radar noise so we can scrub it from our data. Looks like it's working. More details in a recent science newsletter over here.

Other notes: Some quick adjustment of the guides that direct the output of cool air from the closet air conditioner vastly helped the temperature woes I depicted yesterday. Bob's newly streamlined database seemed to grease several bottlenecks. We recovered from our outage quickly yesterday. But then there was a slightly abnormal traffic "hump" which may suggest we were sending out many short/noisy workunits (and I checked there was no sudden increase in active users). And I haven't changed the "feeder polarity" in a while to massage the "mod oddity" problem, though I did so this morning. In any case, one or two or three of these things may have caused our results-to-send queue to drain to zero - it's hard to tell as it's a very dynamic system with many moving parts - but we've been generating work fast enough to just barely keep up with demand throughout the evening. The queue was filling again last I looked. Actually, looks like it's shrinking again. We'll just see what happens.

Oh yeah - I was randomly selected to be user of the day for the beta project yesterday, which is funny as I haven't run the beta project in several years, and my profile (at the time of selection) had nothing but some nonsense test words in it (and luckily nothing profane).

- Matt

---

-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Prior to multibeam acquisition we were taking data from an antenna that was lower than the ALFA feed and was thus in a radar shadow provided by the surrounding hills.

What would it take to raise the hills?

---

The Universe is not only stranger than you imagine, it's stranger than you can imagine.

SETI@home classic workunits 1,405 CPU time 57,318 hours

Prior to multibeam acquisition we were taking data from an antenna that was lower than the ALFA feed and was thus in a radar shadow provided by the surrounding hills.

What would it take to raise the hills?

Or...

How high a wire fence?

Or... Anyone got an ASRAAM spare?

Regards,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Prior to multibeam acquisition we were taking data from an antenna that was lower than the ALFA feed and was thus in a radar shadow provided by the surrounding hills.

What would it take to raise the hills?

Or...

How high a wire fence?

Or... Anyone got an ASRAAM spare?

Regards,
Martin

I think, you want to say, a HARM spare... Ha, ha ,ha...

things may have caused our results-to-send queue to drain to zero - it's hard to tell as it's a very dynamic system with many moving parts - but we've been generating work fast enough to just barely keep up with demand throughout the evening. The queue was filling again last I looked. Actually, looks like it's shrinking again. We'll just see what happens.

Hi Matt.

I think than the words 'power', 'outage' and 'this weekend' in the same phrase, was an inducement to the people who have a BOINC client with cache capabiliy, to increase it to the max. days...

That could explain why 'the results-to-send queue to drain to zero' in short time...

The problem was not tech, don't look for more...

Best Regards. (sorry for my english)

Hay Matt,
Do not want to add to the workload, but think a change made to the system a couple of days ago may have caused a problem.
We ran out of work yesterday and our queue depth had dropped after reading about a change made to the system.
As indicated no big deal, but we may not be the only ones experiencing this.

Great sound tracks on your website - thanks for allowing us to d/l and check em out!

Jeff, Dan, and Eric worked together here and remotely at Arecibo to hook up a radar blanking signal in one of the empty channels on our multibeam recorder - it will tell us at very high time resolution when we are getting hit with radar noise so we can scrub it from our data. Looks like it's working. More details in a recent science newsletter over here.

Other notes: Some quick adjustment of the guides that direct the output of cool air from the closet air conditioner vastly helped the temperature woes I depicted yesterday. Bob's newly streamlined database seemed to grease several bottlenecks. We recovered from our outage quickly yesterday. But then there was a slightly abnormal traffic "hump" which may suggest we were sending out many short/noisy workunits (and I checked there was no sudden increase in active users). And I haven't changed the "feeder polarity" in a while to massage the "mod oddity" problem, though I did so this morning. In any case, one or two or three of these things may have caused our results-to-send queue to drain to zero - it's hard to tell as it's a very dynamic system with many moving parts - but we've been generating work fast enough to just barely keep up with demand throughout the evening. The queue was filling again last I looked. Actually, looks like it's shrinking again. We'll just see what happens.

Oh yeah - I was randomly selected to be user of the day for the beta project yesterday, which is funny as I haven't run the beta project in several years, and my profile (at the time of selection) had nothing but some nonsense test words in it (and luckily nothing profane).

- Matt

---

...
I haven't changed the "feeder polarity" in a while to massage the "mod oddity" problem, though I did so this morning.
...
- Matt

If you have time, could you try that magic on SETI Beta? The "Odd" side got to the end of work created last weekend about 18 hours ago, the "Even" side has lots of work but apparently is seldom contacted.

                                                                 Joe

....
I think than the words 'power', 'outage' and 'this weekend' in the same phrase, was an inducement to the people who have a BOINC client with cache capabiliy, to increase it to the max. days...
...

Exactly!

I am one of these people. ;-)

As soon as I heard about a power outage this weekend, I increased my cache a little bit.


Helli

....
I think than the words 'power', 'outage' and 'this weekend' in the same phrase, was an inducement to the people who have a BOINC client with cache capabiliy, to increase it to the max. days...
...

Exactly!

I am one of these people. ;-)

As soon as I heard about a power outage this weekend, I increased my cache a little bit.


Helli

Ha, ha, ha... I'm too, Helli


Logan.

What kind of screening do the signals you process go through? Would have thought that a RADAR pulse with it's regularity and specific PM would give enough DSP signature to be instantly assesed as man made and therefore not an issue or part of the procesing woes...

Or is SETI DSP and analysis fairly crude?

---

Never engage stupid people at their level, they then have the home court advantage.....

My understanding is that the radar isn't regular, and by the time it makes it across the island and it picked up by our instruments it seems quite unpredictable. The SETI DSP is fairly crude in that it pretty much just does a power threshold cutoff and no data analysis before writing all data to disk. It truly is "raw" data. This may sound bad, but we have some of the fastest boards in the world doing simultaneous "listening" on a large number of channels - potentially collecting a half terabyte of raw data a day at this point. If we leave the radar in our data, all workunits would overflow with noise. If we simply blacked out the affected frequencies all the time we'd lose a sizeable chunk of data. Hence the radar blanking mechanism.

- Matt

What kind of screening do the signals you process go through? Would have thought that a RADAR pulse with it's regularity and specific PM would give enough DSP signature to be instantly assesed as man made and therefore not an issue or part of the procesing woes...

Or is SETI DSP and analysis fairly crude?

---

-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

What kind of screening do the signals you process go through? Would have thought that a RADAR pulse with it's regularity and specific PM would give enough DSP signature to be instantly assesed as man made and therefore not an issue or part of the procesing woes...

Or is SETI DSP and analysis fairly crude?

We are the DSP.

---

Inflamatory idea: is it possible that someone could learn something important (and therefore dangerous) about our radar defense systems by listening to the seti tapes? I suppose the information is readily available to any body with rabbit ears, unless the seti recorders are in some way unusual.

Inflamatory idea: is it possible that someone could learn something important (and therefore dangerous) about our radar defense systems by listening to the seti tapes? I suppose the information is readily available to any body with rabbit ears, unless the seti recorders are in some way unusual.

very good PhonAcq - always bE on thE alErt and kEEp on thinkin' - soMEtiMEs iT

pays in thE most unusual way . . . (Thank You for bringin' iT up, btw . . .)

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Prior to multibeam acquisition we were taking data from an antenna that was lower than the ALFA feed and was thus in a radar shadow provided by the surrounding hills.

What would it take to raise the hills?

Several hundred metric tons of dirt? ;-)

---

.

Hello, from Albany, CA!...

Looks like one could recieve it on the other antenna and invert and sum it to the signal. Active filter.
;)

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Looks like one could recieve it on the other antenna and invert and sum it to the signal. Active filter.
;)

If the interfering signal location is known, I would think that would be the ticket.

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Boinc Button Abuser In Training >My Shrubbers<

Inflamatory idea: is it possible that someone could learn something important (and therefore dangerous) about our radar defense systems by listening to the seti tapes? I suppose the information is readily available to any body with rabbit ears, unless the seti recorders are in some way unusual.

I didn't think the SETI project had any sort of radar systems?

And as for talking (I forget who) about filtering out radar signals as "obviously man-made", aren't we looking for things that are "obviously made by ET", which would look rather similar? But incredibly much smaller in signal strength, obviously.

Cheers,

Howard

---

Inflamatory idea: is it possible that someone could learn something important (and therefore dangerous) about our radar defense systems by listening to the seti tapes? I suppose the information is readily available to any body with rabbit ears, unless the seti recorders are in some way unusual.

I didn't think the SETI project had any sort of radar systems?

And as for talking (I forget who) about filtering out radar signals as "obviously man-made", aren't we looking for things that are "obviously made by ET", which would look rather similar? But incredibly much smaller in signal strength, obviously.

Cheers,

Howard

The radar doesn't belong to SETI. It belongs to the local military.

We're talking about blocking a specific, known source of radio interference.

---

Inflamatory idea: is it possible that someone could learn something important (and therefore dangerous) about our radar defense systems by listening to the seti tapes? I suppose the information is readily available to any body with rabbit ears, unless the seti recorders are in some way unusual.

I didn't think the SETI project had any sort of radar systems?

And as for talking (I forget who) about filtering out radar signals as "obviously man-made", aren't we looking for things that are "obviously made by ET", which would look rather similar? But incredibly much smaller in signal strength, obviously.

Cheers,

Howard

The radar doesn't belong to SETI. It belongs to the local military.

We're talking about blocking a specific, known source of radio interference.

soooo . . . it's bEEn thE gov. all the tiME . . . eh - their blockin' our ET man . . . ;)

~ baCk on topiC ~