Hi All

If we eavesdropped on ETs would we understand them? This week's "New Scientist" had an article about turbo codes and LDPC codes which allow an ever-narrowing approach to the Shannon limit on bit-rates for a given channel. I decided to get something a bit meatier so I did a search and found these articles...

Web page of downloadable references

...includes downloadable referenced articles mentioned elsewhere.

IEEE Spectrum article

...a nice plain language piece.

LDPC codes

...a succinct piece with downloads.

A CommsDesign newsmagazine article

...a bit more technical popularisation.

With such encoding raw signals from ETs would seem to be noise and I wonder how much above background noise signals would need to be for transmission over interstellar distances. Could we look at a star's spectrum and miss a signal? For low bit rates it seems the answer might be "yes".

Adam