How many of you have ever thought of doing amateur SETI? I've done a little bit of research into this and it seems for less than $2000 anyone can run their own SETI search using their home computer and a dish as small as 3m. All the pieces you need are availiable via the seti league. They provide software to do real time analysis on any home computer. Do you guys think that amateur SETI could ever succeed? With a 5m dish or so you could detect a signal over tens of light years away.
Some links
http://www.setileague.org/hardware/techmanu.htm
http://www.setileague.org/hardware/blkdiag.htm

Thoughts?

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It will be impossible for an amateur to beat the sensitivity of the Arecibo telescope.

It's over 300m in diameter and roughly 10,000 times more sensitive than a 3m dish.

The main problem with the Seti setup at Arecibo is that we are looking nowhere in particular :o)

The Seti receiver is pointed more or less randomly along with the rest of the telescope, looking into areas without nearby stars most of the time I guess.

If you do the opposite with your amateur setup, i.e. track a nearby star to get long exposure times, you might (though not very likely) be able to detect something.


Regards Hans

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Wouldn't Background Noise be an Issue with a Small Dish?

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If you thought SETI could be found locally, a small dish would be adequate. Plus, you could scan the fequencies that you want. Then you'd have to unscamble their encryted communications. LOL.

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TEAM
LL

One big problem with amateur SETI is getting other people to believe your results if you found something interesting.

But that aside, yes, but try it on other, lower frequencies than are popular at the moment, although atmospheric absorption and ionospheric reflection/difraction may become an issue if you go too low.

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it is surely worth a try, more research means a greater possibility to find something.

It would be interesting indeed,

However, I am more fond of the idea of having 5 dishes, 1 arecibo, 1 antartica, 1 north pole, 1 austrailia, 1 dark side moon.

But now, I am neither scientifically adept nor a scientist, so what do I know?

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A good example of the building of a small SETI station is my own.
Look at www.SETI.Net for details.

Regards.... Jim

It would be interesting indeed,

However, I am more fond of the idea of having 5 dishes, 1 arecibo, 1 antartica, 1 north pole, 1 austrailia, 1 dark side moon.

But now, I am neither scientifically adept nor a scientist, so what do I know?

I'd add 2 more, both in space and both 360 degrees rotatable (directionable?); one perhaps orbiting Earth, and the other in Earth's orbit but on the other side of the Sun (the opposite side of Earth's orbit).

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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.