In article <fvo6f25j1rg8c9vl1l3smjabqs846m1bi8@4ax.com>,
f/fgeorge <ffgeorge@yourplace.com> wrote:

On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 21:31:42 GMT, "Eric" <nospam@nospam.noo> wrote:

I know we transmitted some short burts a long time ago, but has there ever 
been any consideration to do something more interesting such as:

Get a group of astronomers, biologists, RF engineers, etc together to come 
up with the best "candidate locations" to transmit to.  Good "candidate 

The Encounter 2001 people did some of this.  Their contracted expert
sometimes posts, at least to sci.astro.seti, which is a better newsgroup
for SETI, rather than SETI@Home.

locations" would be relatively near places with star systems that show 
indirect evidence of planets, that show a spectral analysis possibly 

They tend to show contra-indications of life.  In any case, the project
Phoenix target list is a ready made list of appropriate targets.

However, you seem to have forgotten the most important classes of people:

- the politicians to get radio regulatory approval and clear messages
  for transmission;
- the funders to pay for the real estate for antennas, the electrical
  energy, the continuing replacement transmit tubes, etc.

right on by, stopping only when it hits something. No it is not fast
but it is going. Think HBO, ESPN, CNN, etc.

Modern broadcast satellite TV has very little redundancy, which means it
requires a similar order of magnitude of sensitivity to detect it as it
does to make use of the signal, so the ETI would need antennas that are
of the same order of magnitude of effective diameter (one can go smaller,
because one can integrate the power in the whole bandwidth, over a period,
of time, but the large bandwidth also reduces the ability to reject
natural sources) as one would get by scaling the satellite's antenna by
the ratio of however many light years to just over 0.1 light seconds.

The other problem is that the uplink beam is swept with the earth's
rotation, so will only be on target for a few seconds a day.

Basically, leaked digital TV uplinks make rather poor SETI beacons.