After work, I had Zoe cross reference the LAF’s locked-on position with know terrestrial sources.  She said it was a waste of time – though I couldn’t see why.  Meanwhile, I continued to scan through the logs.  So far, the pattern simply continues – 42 waves, 42 silences.  This effort was going too slow, so tonight I just wrote a small application to systematically search the remaining logs and detect if this pattern ever varies.  It is probably not a good use of my time, but hey.

The real interesting news is that Zoe confirmed that the signal was unlikely from a published terrestrial emitter.  I asked here how she knew this.  “Easy !”, she explained, “The log continuously shows each position adjustment “God’s Ear” made after lock-on last night.  Based on these adjustments, it’s easy to tell the movement of what it was tracking with respect to our position.  If it were an airborne platform, it could be either moving or stationary.  If it was a stationary platform, the dish wouldn’t have moved – but it did.  If it was tracking a non-stationary airborne platform, the LAF position would change, but not in the same way as it would if it were tracking a distant object in space.  In fact, the way the LAF was tracking, it was basically compensating for the Earth’s rotation.  This means that whatever it was tracking was either very far away, or local… but moving in a path with ridiculously significant coincidence with the Earth’s rotation.  I’m betting on the former.”

Well, I’m done with the simple search application, and I’m kicking it off as I type this.  We’ll see if it turns up anything tomorrow.  Either way, I can’t think of anything terrestrial or celestial that would emit such a meaningless signal, so I’m curious about what the LAF found.  At this point, though, I can’t help but think that I’m getting sidetracked.  Maybe I should just ignore this signal and keep searching for something more interesting?  Or, maybe I should just go to sleep and worry about this tomorrow!

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…

On Monday night I kicked off the LAF for a test run, but I had hit the panic button about 10 minutes later when I realized it wasn’t working.  I had set the log space limits to a ridiculously small value, but the LAF just kept recording anyway.  After a bit of debugging, I realized that I had set the limits in Kilobytes.   But, the LAF sees these limits as Megabytes. Doh!  Oh yeah, did I mention I’m 41,000 years old today?

Anyway, I’ll kick off the LAF tonight.  It’s late, and I have a big day at work tomorrow.  Also, Zoe wants to take me to a late showing of “The Fifth Element” tomorrow night.  I know, it’s an old flick, but I can’t resist a good Sci-Fi, even if it’s a bit dated.  Besides, we like long movies… 😉

Ok.  I bought six SSD drives, installed them in my backup computer, and configured the new disks as three RAIDS.  This replication of the data will ensure their integrity even if a meteor strikes.  I spent Saturday typing in the LAF code once again from the recent printout.  It didn’t take me that long, and I made some improvements along the way.  On Sunday I added the new logging logic discussed earlier as well as Zoe’s triggers.  I bought a real nice UPS (no birthday presents this year!) to keep the LAF running even throughout a long power outage.  My girlfriend points out that this is silly since the UPS can’t actually power the dish too, but hey – I’m not taking any chances!

Oh, and before I did any of this, I used the backup computer to read the current position of God’s Ear.  Using this position and the time I got from the log file’s latest modification time, I now have an approximate location of where it was pointing last.  Indeed, it wasn’t pointing straight up.  Looks like it was oriented with a right-ascension and declination that put it in the neighborhood of sun HDS-288, which, by the way, is only about 60 light years away!

But, the recovered location is just an approximate value, and I’ve decided that the LAF’s first task will be to scan the narrow band of sky surrounding this star.  Curiously, most of the area surrounding HDS-288 is peculiarly dark.  Hmmmm.  Anyway, I’ll kick this first task off tonight, and maybe something will turn up during the week.  Crossing my fingers!