In article ,
red wrote:

I must respectfully disagree. I don't know about Boinc, but in S@H
classic, there is a power threshold below which Gaussians will not be
reported, no matter what the "fit" may be. I believe that the Gaussians

Having two degrees of freedom makes means that you can trade one against
the other in setting the threshold, but the fact still remains that if
the threshold weren't set to produce lots of false positives from noise
artefacts there ould only really two other possibilities, both of which
would have major consequences for SETI:

a) We're are seeing huge numbers of non-repeating genuine ETI signals; or

b) There are natural phenomena that produce much narrower band signals
than we had previously assumed.

The former would imply proof of ETI and the latter would indicate that the
search strategy is unworkable.

Incidentally, if I remember correctly, there is actually a technical
paper that discusses the threshold selection strategy for pulses.