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Survey, as SETI observations began simultaneously at DSS13 within the Goldstone complex in the Mojave Desert and at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Thereafter, routine Sky Survey observations were conducted weekly, controlling the antenna at Goldstone remotely from JPL, and the first 200 hours (of 2600 hours) of Arecibo Targeted Search observations were completed by mid-November. No credible candidate ETI signals were detected. The false alarm rate from RFI at L-band (roughly 1.4 GHz) was very high at both sites, whereas S-band (roughly 2.3 GHz) was relatively free from interference. In addition to verifying the performance of the special-purpose supercomputers that had been developed to serve as spectrometers and pattern recognition devices for the Sky Survey and Targeted Search, these initial observations provided the first good look at the temporal structure of the bothersome RFI. In the case of the Targeted Search, these valuable early lessons resulted in the development of additional signal processing components to permit simultaneous operation at two widely separated observing sites as a pseudo-interferometer, for the purpose of verifying the extraterrestrial origin of detected candidate signals.
Both the Sky Survey and the Targeted Search were expanding their instantaneous frequency coverage when Congress terminated the funds for HRMS on October 1, 1993 after only one year of a planned ten-year observing program. This paper describes the publicly available data sets that have been archived from that first year of observing, it also summarizes the lessons learned from our field experience, and provides a brief progress report on the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, that will complete the targeted search with private funding.
