Thomas Shaddack wrote:
FIPS-140 is your friend. They did the math. Cheers - Bill
fips140.c is a cool toy, thanks :) However, a bit unusable for my
purposes; the tests I run on data from /dev/dsp always fail. (I am using
the tuner card, tuned to between the channels; visual test (cat /dev/dsp)
looks like a noise.)
About 1% of this noise is cosmic-ray background, caused by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.
Unlikely in the extreme. Even galactic cosmic rays with TeV energies are unimpressive when dissipating their (paltry) energy over several hundred m^3, let alone over hundreds of km^3. The somewhat more common GeV-energy particles are literally inconsequential.
Signals in antennae are driven by energy. And a GeV or even a TeV event tens of klicks away (above) is not capable of sending out enough RF energy. Whistlers and other noise sources are functions of the solar wind, fluctuations in the ionoshere and troposphere, but not, at any distance, caused by single high-Z particle impacts.
Next you'll be claiming that chips can be influenced by cosmic and background radiation!
--Tim May
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler
