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Can DirectTV-type satellite dishes be used for SETI?
I was interested to read this on the Seti League web site:
__________________________________________________ ________ Parasitic SETI Dear Dr. SETI: As a Satellite dish owner and a strong interest in SETI, I was wondering if anything is available to allow the home satellite dish owner to 'search' when he is not watching TV. I do a bit of programing and would love to help make it so home dish owners could do this. Is it possible? What would it take? Does the dish have to follow a spot or can it sweep the sky from a fixed position? If this is possible it could add a million listeners to the system. Bill T. The Doctor Responds: Absolutely, Bill! Parasitic SETI with a home satellite TV dish is not only feasilble, it's widely practiced. A second feedhorn and preamp assembly are mounted next to the C-band horn/LNB at the apex of the dish (see Figure 2 of this article). This assembly feeds the rest of a SETI system (see our online Tech Manual). You can then sweep out the sky, as described here. And yes, a million participants would be nice, but our goal is a more modest 5000 stations. __________________________________________________ ________ http://www.setileague.org/askdr/parasite.htm I believe they are referring to the 6 ft. backyard type antennas, judging from the linked images on the page. But could the roof mounted DirectTV and Dish Network type antennas be used for SETI? The mentioned extra equipment are an extra feedhorn and a preamplifier. The feedhorn can made cheaply but the preamp seems expensive. If these preamps were mass produced for this purpose could their per item cost be brought under $50? I'm envisionig a government agency such as NSF, or a scientically interested billionaire, paying satellite TV companies to attach this extra equipment to their satellite dishes. Say $100 million is earmarked for the program. Then you would want the extra cost to be under $100 for each dish for say 1,000,000 subscribers. Judging from the diagram in the online Tech Manual linked to on the page, the other equipment should be doable by the equipment that comes with the satellite TV system. Computer processing would be done separately at a central location. If you had a 1,000,000 of these .5 meter wide antennas it would have the detection sensitivy of a single antenna 500 meters wide. Bob Clark |
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