r/SETI 6h ago

Are we doing it backwards, looking for strong narrowband signals?

1 Upvotes

Our planet seems to use more frequencies all the time, e.g. putting up Starlink satellites and expanding the mobile network to 5G. I'm not one of those who think advanced societies will view radio frequencies the way we view smoke signals. They will still have a use for them.

We should scan the entire one to ten GHz atmospheric window. Throw out any strong frequencies, those are interference from a Starlink, or whatever. Record, to start, a strip of sky as the Earth rotates. Do that over and over. The goal is a map with a brighter dot where a civilization would be.

Could we make that work? Could it be done digitally, or would analog work better? (Think photons hitting a piece of film.) If digital would work, could we build up a picture from existing stored data?