It would have to be a very specific kind of device. The "Wow!" signal isn't broad-spectrum noise. It's one specific frequency, and it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal.
Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.
> it just happens to be a frequency near one we expect to be used as a signal.
What's the reasoning for this? I've seen noted that the Wow signal of 1420 MHz is near the hydrogen line frequency, and is commonly detected astrophysically.
So is the reasoning just that, if you want to send a signal, then you might choose this frequency because other civilizations will probably have detectors tuned to it?
But then the flip-side of that is that if you detect this frequency, then it's almost certainly natural origin, from the excitation of hydrogen.
yes that other 'people' will be listening, no, because you can pulse it with the fibbonaci sequence or prime numbers, which are not easily produced by astrophysical processes.
We have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.
Yep. It's wildly unlikely that this was any kind of deliberate signal. Whatever caused it, it only happened once -- which isn't what you'd expect from aliens hoping to make contact.
We only recorded the fact of the signal's existence, without enough resolution to make out any pattern within it. If the aliens were hoping we'd decode it, they were banking on us happening to catch their signal at a very specific instant in time, never to be repeated.
On our timescale, sure. But then we wouldn't want to communicate with intelligences that experience time so differently that a pulsed signal from their perspective would be a single pulse from our perspective.
Somebody could well have been walking across a field with a 1450 MHz generator. I don't know why; maybe it was a prototype of a portable microwave-oven/Walkman mashup. If so, it was leaky, and perhaps that's why it never caught on.