Poor Reception No Spots!!!

The Sun has been a blank slate concerning sunspots 15 days total this year. Current stretch of 11 days. Shortwave radio needs sun spots for best propagation. If you voted do you think the Sun will be spotless for a long time? Please post your replies.

Yet many on the east coast were treated to a 6Y5 Jamaica station for DX this weekend on 6 meters. During the June VHF contest some stations were working into Japan on 6.

Turn your radio on, tune around, call CQ, and don't worry about it.

There is absolutely no 'voting' involved here. Many aspects of solar physics are not well understood, and the reasons for a sun with no spots could mean any number of things, including the beginning of the end to the current sunspot cycle which has been the weakest in a century.

We just have to roll with the flow (or lack thereof) and see what Sol fires up next. It's not, unfortunately, an exact science

Mike

Yeah, the Sun is kind of asleep, and the MUF is down because of it. That means that higher freqs generally suck right now. But lower freqs are still fine. Every morning Asian stations boom in for me, as loud as ever, from 13 MHz down.

T!

40 is the new 20.

Even if we're on the 11 year cycle and not entering a solar minimum phase, we've got a few more low activity years ahead; get ready for 80 and 160 and take that much more enjoyment in making the contacts that require a little more effort.

Same old same old at this receive station, give or take conditions.

Despite poor sunspots, still hear stuff on CW. Hear occasional Europe on 20 CW. 40 and lower doing fine. Worked an EA6 in Mallorca (Mediterranean) from Los Angeles with 100 W and vertical couple of nights ago. Always something seems to be around. As Token above says, morning Asian stations quite loud. Sure, not as good as when sunspots, but stuff is out there.

Steve AA6IO

It's times of lousy HF that have always spurred me on to explore other areas of radio. I've handled traffic, tried new digital modes (not my cup of tea), done some satellite work, terrestrial VHF - SSB/CW on 6/2/432 (now you're talking), meteor scatter, and even put up a C or Ku band microwave FTA satellite TV dish or two. Heck, I've even done some police/fire scanning! There's too much going on in radio to EVER be bored.

OK what about the non-ham stuff? Surely some folks had pirates over the holidays (and should be reported in the SWBC forum) hint hint...Mike

The sun appears to be heading for a Grand Minimum, the bottom of a 400-year cycle that last bottomed out during the Maunder Minimum in the 17th Century or so.

Check out the Suspicious Observers websites.

http://www.suspicious0bservers.org

This is also what has been screwing up the "global warming" hoax for the past 20 years. The Sun becomes less active and the planets cool. That's why none of the global warming based climate models have made any correct predictions. The Maunder Minimum caused a mini-Ice Age. Mainstream "science" (politically motivated) has it backwards. Every planet in the solar system with an atmosphere is cooling. NASA has noted the declining activity even in Jupiter's atmosphere.

ka3jjz said:

There is absolutely no 'voting' involved here. Many aspects of solar physics are not well understood, and the reasons for a sun with no spots could mean any number of things, including the beginning of the end to the current sunspot cycle which has been the weakest in a century.

We just have to roll with the flow (or lack thereof) and see what Sol fires up next. It's not, unfortunately, an exact science

Mike

Click to expand...

We've got two factors going. The first, solar-terrestrial physics, but the second is the decline of targets for SWLing. I see it a lot on several FB forums, there's a monster steerable HF antenna that was the envy of the world now on its side getting cut up for scrap metal to make way for new housing units. I'd have to say that last factor plays heavily. I got one of the Globe Patrol kits in the 3rd grade. After it was assembled and a few feet of wire was attached to the antenna terminal, it was nothing short of amazement. There are very few outlets now. Thankfully, there are a few still going.

The shame of that is that we are no longer hearing external service news. There's no one in the originating nation distilling down local news into the important points and broadcasting that. Instead, everything's gone tabloid on these interwebs. I'll even lament the death of VHF low band. Fast forward to high school, I hooked my Bearcat 210 to a CB antenna and an Ameco preamp. I got that rush of amazement once again, as I logged so much activity from 30 - 50 MHz. That's not there anymore, either. You can have the same receivers working to the same specs using the same antennas. Can't catch what's not being pitched.

As for propagation, you're right. Currently, NVIS has been very difficult, and we're getting either a lot of absorption, or are "going long" on some bands at unique times. Even with ALE, I have periods of link outages where no frequency has good enough characteristics to get from here to there. We can hold on and hope we'll have better than Cycle 21 and 22 again in our lifetimes. But forget about that passive activity. That's all gone. It's up to us to get on the air and make our own. As for me, I'll be tuning around from 50.08 to about 50.21 (my favorite band!), call CQ a few times and see who answers. Maybe scanning 29.6 and 52.525, too.

DaveNF2G said:

NASA has noted the declining activity even in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Click to expand...

Even casual radio astronomers can note the decline. Forty years ago, I had a tabletop CB that I left on much of the time talking to friends in and around town. There would be a sweeping noise that wooshed through the band frequently. I thought it was solar noise, but didn't learn until I was older that it was Jovian noise (I'm still floored by that).

Well, I have better antennas and hotter receivers now. I still tune around way more than I transmit, and I hear a lot of stuff, but not that so much anymore.

There's always AM radio DXing too. THAT band is open every night. Guaranteed, with 4,778 AM stations to be logged. How many do you have? GO!

Lots of South American stations yesterday evening (the 5th here) on the 49m band about 0900z/2100local but the bands above 30m were very flat.

That's New Zealand! Nowhere near New England, New Hampshire or New York - as some seem to think! :wink:

Every time I switch on the SW receiver I hear a semi-dead 20 meter band, the SW bands between 19 and 49 meters are mostly blah, and the MW band is the same 300 stations I usually hear on a standard evening.

No particular lower band boost from low sunspots here -- at least not yet

Maybe this coming Fall and Winter will be good DX seasons because of it, though.

This is kind of cheating, a little, but I've found that a change in geography could be pretty interesting for listening around. I use the SDR receiver in the Netherlands to hear stuff from a different vantage point in the world. This thing has a tuned antenna, but still works very nicely, especially for longwave.

The Netherlands one has low latency. I've been able to hear echos of myself coming back. The ones in the US (KiwiSDR, a different receiver and user interface) have a second or two latency.

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

I wish people would put VHF and UHF ones up just to check out the local environment.