Re: SETI public: 8 bit soundcards

• Previous message: Jesse Young: "SETI public: 8 bit soundcards"
• In reply to: Jesse Young: "SETI public: 8 bit soundcards"

Hello Jesse,

8 bits is not only enough, it's already an overkill.
Many professional SETI programs work with ONE bit sampling.

8 bits gives you 48 dB of dynamic range (6dB per bit).
If you set the noise level from your receiver at -10dB to avoid clipping,
the quantisation noise will represent only 0.016% of your
total noise, totally negligible. A fly sitting on your dish will be
a bigger degradation :-)

The only case when extra bits would be handy would be if you had
strong narrowband interference within your receivers passband
which you would wnat to filter out digitally. But in that case it
would make much more sense just to retune your RX to avoid it.
(you would have to write the filtering program yourself since none
of the popular SETI programs has that option)

Marko Cebokli

On Thursday 08 April 2004 05:33, Jesse Young wrote:
> I'm currently attempting to set up a SETI station and I'm interested to
> know if an 8 bit soundcard would provide adequate resolution for
> processing the output from a microwave receiver. I don't have a great
> deal of knowledge in this area.
>
> Any help will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Jesse Young

• Previous message: Jesse Young: "SETI public: 8 bit soundcards"
• In reply to: Jesse Young: "SETI public: 8 bit soundcards"

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