SETICon04 Technical Symposium

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First point of contact for SETICon04 attendees was SETI League secretary/treasurer A. Heather Wood, seen here ably staffing the registration table. SETI League photo

The selection of SETI League publications and membership premiums available at the registration table seems to grow every year. SETI League photo

This year's SETICon was held jointly with the 11th International Amateur Radio Moonbounce Conference, significantly swelling our numbers. SETI League photo

A variety of antenna controllers were demonstrated in the vendor's room at SETICon04. Most feature digital readout, computer interface, and rotors to enable antennas to automatically track celestial objects. SETI League photos

Some of the most interesting SETICon technical discussions occured in the break and hospitality rooms during meals. SETI League photo

Moonbounce conference chairman Marc Franco (left) and SETI League EME committee chairman Allen Katz set up for a talk. The flags represent the nationalities of this year's attendees. SETI League photo

EME committee chairman Al Katz, K2UYH, is a longtime champion of stressed parabolic dish antennas. Here he describes a light-weight, portable seven foot offset-fed stressed dish. SETI League photo

Harry Kimball explains how he expanded his Project Argus station's bandwidth from 3 kHz to 96 kHz, for about $200 worth of hardware and software. SETI League photo

Allen Tough reports on the status of the International Academy of Astronautics' protocols for communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI League photo

Harry Kimball's paper "SETI Signal Processing Tradeoffs" explained the relationship between and limitations on integration gain, spectral resolution (bin width), and processing time. SETI League photo

Marko Cebokli speaking with his parabolic reflectors -- rather, his hands -- in describing his SImple Digital Interferometer (SIDI) project. SETI League photo

Rob Lodder's talk on multivariate response data reduction included both mathematical background and practical applications of his analysis techniques. SETI League photo

During lunch break on SETICon04 day two, Allen Tough hosted an Invitation to ETI Committee meeting. SETI League photo

Canadian enthusiast George Raynault, new to The SETI League this year, discusses the human impact of ETI contact. SETI League photo

Marko Cebokli describes accurate time and frequency references for very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). SETI League photo

Allen Tough (center, holding notepad) acts as moderator for a panel discussion on "Achieving Contact: fresh views, new paths." Panelists (clockwise from Allen) included Cindy Corriveau, George Raynault, Heather Wood, Richard Factor, Rob Lodder, and Paul Shuch. SETI League photo

Heather Wood (left) and Paul Shuch (right) opened our annual Awards Reception with a couple of songs. SETI League photos

At the SETICon04 Awards Reception, awards committee chairman David Ocame (left) and executive director H. Paul Shuch present the third Orville N. Greene Service Award via teleconference to Ed Cole, AL7EB. Cole, a prominent radio amateur and microwave experimenter, has been an active contributor to SETI League technical activities for a number of years. He serves as The SETI League's volunteer Regional Coordinator for Alaska, participates actively on the organization's various technical email discussion lists, has given papers at previous SETICon Technical Symposia, has contributed articles and software to the group's website, and last year conducted the first SETICon Hardware Workshop. Further details appear in this Press Release. SETI League photo

Prof. Rob Lodder, editor of the peer-reviewed periodical Contact In Context, announces the selection of Jon Lomberg, a respected space artist living in Hawaii, for that scientific journal's 2004 Best Ideas Award. Over the years, Lomberg contributed the illustrations and artistic designs to several of Carl Sagan's books, his TV series Cosmos, and the film adaptation of his novel Contact. He was design director for NASA's Voyager record, as well as the Portrait of Humanity, a photograph which had initially been scheduled to fly aboard the Cassini spacecraft, but which sadly was deleted from the flight manifest prior to launch. His recent Contact In Context article "Portrait of Humanity," which this award honors, tells the story of that abortive attempt at announcing humankind's place in the cosmos. SETI League photo

Prof. Allen Tough, editorial assistant for Contact In Context, announces a Best Ideas Honorable Mention to James N. Gardner, for his book called BIOCOSM, The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe. SETI League photo

This year, the editors of Contact In Context honored The SETI League website, presenting special Best Ideas Awards to SETI League founder Richard Factor (left), and webmaster H. Paul Shuch (right), for "providing a wide-ranging forum for creative, innovative, and controversial ideas. Such a forum, free from ultraconservative prejudice and subtle censorship, is especially important in the SETI field -- a field that clearly needs fresh ideas and voices." SETI League photo

For the fourth year in a row, every SETICon attendee went home with a door prize. First Prize, a 1420 MHz weak signal source kit donated by Down East Microwave Inc., went to Marko Cebokli (right). Allen Tough (left) won the Grand Prize, a 1420 MHz helical antenna feed contributed by Olde Antenna Labs of Denver CO. SETI League photo

Keynote speaker at our annual banquet was Prof. Joseph Taylor, K1JT, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Physics. Joe Taylor is both a world-class radio astronomer and a lifelong radio amateur, well known for his development of the WSJT and JT-44 digital communications modes. He routinely acknowledges the prominent role which his amateur radio background has played in his professional and academic success, and in his talk, touched on the important contributions still being made by dedicated amateurs in the fields of radio astronomy and SETI. SETI League photo

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