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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If you want to rate the strength of something, you can easily do that using numbers. When you rate the strength of it over time, you can record that as a sequence of numbers. But what do you do if the thing you’re recording goes to 11 and you’ve only left one space available to record it? You can pretend that letters are just bigger numbers and tack them onto the end, so one bigger than 9 is A, two bigger than 9 is B, and so on. It’s just a convention for writing down numbers that represent a signal strength.
(Additional note: the actual “wow” part of it wasn’t data, that was just the person who found it noting their surprise in the margin. I suspect you know that but it wasn’t entirely clear from the post.)
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