Breakthrough Listen

This project seems like a fool's errand. After screwing with for a long time and actually creating a Delphi wrapper for the HDF5 DLL, I find that there is no support for this type of one-person investigation. No user forums, no useable database, nowhere to post questions, nothing. I am putting this project on hold....

I have decided that I want to analyze the files created by the Breakthrough Listen project with my own software algorithms. I want to do this because it seems like a worthy challenge.

My plan is to download, one at a time, the monster files from Berkeley SETI Research Center, use blimpy, running under Ubuntu to extract a series of 20 KHz wide slices of a dataset that contains a hit. Then, with a tool of my own design, I will convert that slice to something that can be feed back into the SETI Net Spectrum Analyzer to be searched.

I quickly found that extracting the strip is not a problem using blimpy but then working with the resulting HDF5 file is. That is where I am at this point - learning how to handle HDF5 files of data.

Stay tuned.

Reference Material

  1. Target Selection Nearby Stars.pdf
  2. Working with Filterbank files (TBD)