Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro...
by pps43 on Friday September 14, 2018 @08:55PM
(#17992284)
It is possible for the signal to be below the background noise. For example, GPS works this way. Sonars on submarines do the same thing, they send out a noise-like signal that can be detected only if you know what to correlate it with. There's always some noise to hide the signal in.
Re:SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating fro...
by garmaine on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @06:00PM
(#18019574)
This isn’t true. If the signal was below the noise threshold, and no mechanism provided for detecting noise separately (as twisted pair provides, for example) it would be literally impossible to separate signal from noise. That’s what the noise threshold means.
GPS is not below the level of background noise. Not is sonar.
You could defeat this analysis by actually broadcasting noise on all frequencies, so the transmission frequency is indistinguishable, assuming the encryption used is also indistinguishable from a random oracle. But now you have a noisy point source in the sky, even if you can't decipher the contents of the message.
Succinctly put, obfuscation techniques like frequency hopping spread spectrum are tactical techniques that try to hide transmissions from actual radios in widespread use, not hide the existence of the radio signal in some physical sense. FHSS radio transmissions look like noise sources, not silence. Which is basically what SETI is looking for -- sources of radio noise unexplained by our understanding of astronomy.