Daily Archives: 4/17/2010

Yes! Arecibo!

Or should that be maybe? Arecibo?

In the world of visual astronomy, it is well known that your eye’s peak sensitivity to light doesn’t occur right when you are staring at an object directly. To detect the faintest galaxies, you must stare slightly away from where the object is, and you’ll see it pop into view. This technique is called “averted vision”.

This leads to another phenomenon, which is detection through the use of “averted imagination”. You know a faint fuzzy is there, so you imagine that you see it.

While KP4AO was operating CW from Arecibo, I took my naked FT-817 outside with the cheapie 11 element cheap yagi I made, and aimed it where I determined the moon should be. And I heard… well…. something. I’d normally drag my laptop out with me to record, but I had my little Sony digital recorder, so used that instead. Here’s the audio, transferred back to my laptop (the file is a .WAV file, uncompressed, but the Sony does do some compression, so chances are this is slightly less legible than what I heard at the headphones):

Recording of Arecibo (???) from CM87ux using an FT-817 and a Cheap Yagi

I heard a few characters scattered in there, but maybe it’s my imagination. Tell me what you think!