SETI-Italia 2003 status report and first results of a KL Transform algorithm for ETI signal detection.

Abstract SETI-Italia is the Italian national SETI Program. It is run as a part of the Italian Bioastronomy Project, by IRA (Istituto di Radioastronomia) a subsidiary of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica. At the moment, Italy is the only European country conducting a continuous SETI “listening” program, while occasional SETI searches may be conducted in France and the Ukraine. Outside Europe, continuous SETI programs are conducted in the USA, Australia and Argentina. The SETI-Italia activities started early in 1998 with a Serendip IV system connected in piggy-back mode to the Medicina VLBI 32-m antenna dish. In the years 2002/2003, considerable efforts were devoted to set up a fast computational system capable of computing the KLT (Karhunen–Loeve transform). This is a virtually new mathematical procedure in SETI, and is much more general than the FFT. It can search for the presence of signals both narrow-band and wide-band embedded in noise both coloured and white. The mathematical features the KLT have already been described in this Conference by Claudio Maccone [Innovative SETI by the KLT, Pesek Lecture 2003, paper # IAA.9.1.01 presented in Bremen, in this 2003 International Astronautical Congress [1] ; Telecommunications, KLT and Relativity, vol. 1, IPI Press, Colorado Springs, CO, 1994, ISBN #1-880930-04-8 [2] .]. Our software implementation of the KLT follows these lines and also is indebted to some basic ideas put forward by Robert S. Dixon [On the detection of unknown signals, in: G. Seth Shostak (Ed.), Third Decennial US–USSR Conference on SETI, Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, vol. 47, 1993, pp. 128–140] of the Ohio State Radio Observatory as early as 1993.