At 07:36 AM 6/13/01 -0700, John Young wrote:
David Honig wrote:
Two words: antenna design.
A third is signal analysis.
A principle argument against being able to sort through the geometric increase in devices that leak emissions since the 1960s is that it is nearly impossible to find a pin in the hugely noisy haystack of the electrogmagnetic spectrum.
Help me out here with signal analysis capability even with the niagara of the digital age. Is it not possible to sort through a very large range of signal using readily available algorithms to then pinpoint the signature of types of sources, then home in on subsets of those sources, to finally single out a particular source?
Gosh, you just described Seti@home... massive, distributed, fine-toothed combing the spectra received from a very very specific direction. My reference to antenna design meant that you can filter out all the other emitters by using very high gain (ergo very directional) scoops. Look at the milky way ---a glowing cloud. But point a high gain receiver (ie, telescope) and you can pick out individual emitters, and resolve their spectra, which leaks info about their composition. ..... For every net that's gone quiet by using fiber, there's another that just installed a wireless LAN with the default password.