Being gadget gal emmie, pleaze let us know how all your other gadgets work during this event if its a strong as they say, or its another millennium dud!!!
:

Those Ham Radios still run on tubes don't they?

Quote Originally Posted by emilya
You can not imagine how happy I am to see this solar activity! Normally we go in an 11 year cycle from peak to peak in sunspot activity and with them, the activation of our ionosphere here on earth. For us Ham Radio operators, this is the thing we wait for... at the peaks of activity it is very easy to communicate... in the valleys it is hard to get a signal to bounce (skip) no matter what we do.
This cycle has been an odd one. Instead of bottoming out around November of 2009 and heading back up into the new cycle, we hit a period called a Mounder Minimum... the second one in all the time we have been counting sunspots since the 1500's! It has been a period of NO solar activity since then... a quiescent sun that has made world wide radio communication nearly impossible.
Up until this week, there has been nothing going on. Today I am hearing signals from all over the globe. This morning I talked to the Ukraine, Japan and the Sudan. It has been too long. Hopefully this new flare has signaled the beginning of a new cycle and we will build to a peak again in the next 5.5 years. That is when it gets crazy in the radio world. I have actually pointed my antenna one direction and then heard my own voice circle the globe 5 times before it faded out. During the peak, you can talk from the Midwest to Europe with a coat hanger as an antenna and 1 Watt of power. I can't wait.
But anyway... that is the truth behind this story. This flare is a good thing. Don't let the press fool you into thinking this is something odd or dangerous. Anything for a story... sometimes these press people really annoy me.

Emmie