How do radio signals from space get turned into text? I never understood how signals get turned into text such as the wow! signal. How do they work
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It wasn’t turned into text, that was just a way of reporting the intensity
This was 1977, there weren’t sweet graphics on 4k screens to show a sick plot of the energy received. It all had to be consolidated into an output “file” that was just a constant stream of paper from a printer
Their system worked by capturing signals for 10 seconds then figuring out what the average power it received in that time was, then using a single character to report how much power it received. [Wikipedia has a plot showing it](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Wow_signal_profile.svg/1201px-Wow_signal_profile.svg.png) but the more power received the further into the alphabet the letter is.
Instead of writing 6 15 20 27 31 20 5 it converted it into 6 E Q U J 5 so it only ever had to write a single character for any measurement window
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