SETI League Technical Manual -- SoftwareSETIFox is a suite of four shareware programs for SETI data analysis and station control. The SETIFox programs operate in the Windows 95/98/NT/2000 environment, having the following capabilities:
Configuration Utility - for configuring the SETIFox programs with the local coordinaties, dish elevation and azimuth. The utility is also used for setting serial port configuration, frequencies being scanned, and radio control strings for a wide range of radios.
Doppler Detection Program - is a program that looks for changes in the radio spectrum that are occuring at a linear rate (such as a narrow band carrier drifting through the beam of the antenna). Signals that are not drifting in frequency, or have a drift rate that falls outside the search parameters, will tend to be cancelled out in the detection and integration algorithm. When a signal is detected, information raw data is logged along with the doppler display to help determine the source of the detection.
Data Extraction Utility - is used to examine the logged files from the Data Detection Program and to convert the data to other formats.
Scanning Power Logging Program - is used to scan a range of frequencies and log the relative power at each frequency. The readings are logged to a text file which can then be imported into a spreadsheet such as Excel.
Status:
At present all four programs are being downloaded regularly and apparently being used with very little problem. Radio control strings have been written and used for controlling several types of ICOM radios as well as an AOR AR5000. The Doppler Detection easily detects GPS satellites passing through the beam of the antenna. While this is not a narrow band signal, the frequency components do drift at a linear rate and trigger the detection algorithm. The Scanning Power Logging Program is being used by several amateur radio astronomers.
Availability:
SETIFox is available for download from http://php.indiana.edu/~foxd/home-seti.html.
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