What sorts of signals are being analyzed, and what form does the signal analysis take?
We search for strong narrow band signals. It’s like tuning your radio set to various channels, and looking at the signal strength meter. If the strength meter goes up, that gets our attention. More technically, it’s a lot of digital signal processing, mostly Fourier Transforms at various chirp rates and durations. We also search for pulsing and drifting signals, and signals which match the antenna beam pattern as the telescope slews across the sky. The analysis software searches for signals about 10 times weaker than any search done to date, because it makes use of a computationally intensive algorithm called “coherent integration” that no one else (including our Serendip program) has had the computing power to implement.
