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…