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Test of a Wow@Home Radio Telescope
Test of a Wow@Home Radio Telescope
This page presents a test of our first Wow@Home Radio Telescope hardware and software configuration. The system is designed to emulate, as closely as possible, the observation protocol used by the Ohio SETI project in the 1970s. As in the original setup, we use a 10 kHz channel width and a 12-second integration time. However, our system differs in several ways: it features 256 channels instead of 50, a much larger beam size, but significantly lower sensitivity.
While optimized for educational use, this configuration also yields valuable data on radio frequency interference (RFI) near the H I line in urban environments, helping us assess the likelihood of RFI mimicking a Wow!-like signal. Additionally, it serves as a practical platform for a wide-field search for strong transient events, whether of astrophysical origin or potential technosignatures.
The Wow@Home Radio Telescope operates autonomously, 24/7, as a meridian-style instrument, conducting a continuous all-sky survey for transient events.
Figure 1: The top panel shows the raw power as a function of time. The middle panel presents the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) calculated using the Ohio SETI protocol. Most RFI here originates from continuum sources, which are relatively easy to filter out. The bottom panel displays the cleaned dynamic spectrum, with the Galactic center transiting near 6 hours and the Galactic anticenter near 20 hours. The horizontal line at channel 224 marks a test signal spanning the telescope’s beamwidth. An actual narrowband RFI event is visible near channel 0 after 15 hours.
Figure 2: Neutral Hydrogen (H I) spectral profile of the Galactic center, extracted from the data in Figure 1 at 6.5 hours. Error bars represent the 1σ uncertainty in each frequency channel.
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