This is crazy. I kicked off the LAF Tuesday night before I went to bed, and by morning, it had scanned about an eighth of its tasked area by the time I headed out to work. When I came home, it had surveyed nearly half of star’s surrounding area. I received not a single email or tweet throughout the day. I even checked on the computer again before we left for the movie and all was well. The log was empty except for the occasional update on the antenna’s position. As I said before, there doesn’t appear to be much of anything in the narrow band surrounding star HDS-288. At least not in the visible spectrum. I was mulling over the idea of relaxing the frequency scan range but I eventually decided to do this only on completion of the this pass. After all, the job was now half done. If this first run failed, I could always tweak the parameters and try again later.
So, we headed off to see “The Fifth Element”. I really love this movie. It is an adventure, comedy, love story, and sci-fi all rolled into one! Anyway, on the way home I decided to turn on my iPhone. I had turned it off when the movie began around 8:00pm. It was now more than two and a half hours later. The phone immediately began to shake like a kid in a candy shop. I was driving on the highway at this point, so I threw the phone to Zoe. She gave me a dirty look, but her eyes opened wide as she read the display. She read it out loud to me: “You have 117 emails from the LAF… Oh, and one from a very important online vendor.” I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, and slammed on my breaks.
The triggers were firing all right. Zoe read the first message: “Are you having problems satisfying your loved one at night? Your troubles are now over! We deliver affordable Viagra discretely to your door…” I smiled at Zoe, and shook my head. I grabbed the phone back and read the first LAF message. It had the subject: “Signal detected, locking in frequency”. In it contained some low level diagnostic info that I could examine later. The second message read: “Signal analyzed. Frequency Modulation detected.” I quickly jumped to the third message which read: “LAF now recording to disk 0x0”.
What followed were nearly 100 emails containing updates to the ongoing data recording. The last email put the data recording at around 93%. I panicked. “Zoe, we gotta get home – now!”, I said. I was about to slam on the gas when I glanced up and noticed the red and blue flashing lights in the rear window. Crap, just what I needed. It seemed like forever, but a policewoman eventually got out and made her way over to our car. She asked me why I was parked on the side as I was. She then looked at Zoe and said: “Are you ok?” Zoe smiled and said she was. Then I told her we needed to get home to my computer which had been sending us urgent email. I didn’t realize how that sounded until the policewoman asked me to step slowly out of the car.
For the next ten minutes I was asked to walk lines and perform endless tricks. Eventually she asked me what I do for a living. When it became clear that I was a “geek” by trade, my behavior no longer seemed as strange. Eventually she let me go, but the whole ordeal took way too long. When she left, I tried not to rush home because I didn’t want to stop again, and this time have to explain why I was speeding. When we arrived home the house was dark. Zoe turned on the lights while I ran to my office to check on the LAF. The screen had timed-out and was black, so I quickly jiggled the mouse and brought up the LAF console.
The last entry in the LAF log read: “Disk 0x2 exhausted, LAF shutting down collection”. Crap. Crap. This is exactly what I didn’t want. I looked at the current status indicators which displayed the current position of “God’s Ear”, but “No Signal” was currently being detected. I was exhausted at this point, but I was even more curious, so I scanned the beginning of the recording on the first disk. For frequency modulation I simply record the demodulated wave. On the screen I saw a single pattern continuously repeating. There were equal sized waves followed by silence for an equal amount of time. After closer inspection, I counted and found each set contained 42 waves. Not very exciting.
This was most likely a terrestrial signal, and not one from space. Probably just a test pattern from some military vehicle. Ah well. What a day. Tomorrow night, after work, I’ll cross reference the last sky position, time, and frequency with likely terrestrial emitters to see what the LAF found. At some point I need to add logic to the program so signals like this are automatically rejected. Right now, though, we’re going to sleep! What a day…