HFU HF Underground

Technical Topics => Propagation => Topic started by: ChrisSmolinski on April 12, 2019, 0954 UTC

Title: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: ChrisSmolinski on April 12, 2019, 0954 UTC
f you like solar minimum, good news: It could last for years. That was one of the predictions issued last week by an international panel of experts who gathered at NOAA's annual Space Weather Workshop to forecast the next solar cycle. If the panel is correct, already-low sunspot counts will reach a nadir sometime between July 2019 and Sept 2020, followed by a slow recovery toward a new Solar Maximum in 2023-2026.

"We expect Solar Cycle 25 will be very similar to Cycle 24: another fairly weak maximum, preceded by a long, deep minimum," says panel co-chair Lisa Upton, a solar physicist with Space Systems Research Corp.

"Here," she says, "is a figure showing the last minimum and where we are with the current minimum."

(http://spaceweather.com/images2019/10apr19/minima3_strip.png)

"As you can see – we haven't quite reached the lowest levels of the last cycle – where we experienced several consecutive months with no sunspots. However, the panel expects that we should reach those levels [between now and the end of 2020]."

Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: redhat on April 19, 2019, 1627 UTC
Hmmm...it might be time to buy that bigger generator, and a larger transmitter :)

+-RH
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: Strange Beacons on April 19, 2019, 1808 UTC
Solar minimum is why there are cobwebs on my IC-7300, and why I've purchased a lot of new gear for my U/VHF radio setup.
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: Josh on April 19, 2019, 1839 UTC
Time to get familiar with the extreme low power modes like wspr and so on and so forth.
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: Pigmeat on April 26, 2019, 1750 UTC
Get a high powered megaphone, you mo-rons!

When I was in my teens my cousin Dave built a low-power MW tx so we could reach the large park and new mall across the river from his house. Both were big hangouts for people our age. The river was roughly a third of a mile across there. Dave lived on the  riverbank, we thought it would be dead easy to hit that park and the mall parking lot? We were going to be teen heroes and get all the girls. Wrong. You couldn't hear us at my cousin Ed's house 150 yards away. We'd have been better off buying a piece of crap PA system, putting a speaker in the window, and cranking it to the max.

Live and learn.
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: Strange Beacons on April 26, 2019, 1831 UTC
Time to get familiar with the extreme low power modes like wspr and so on and so forth.

Absolutely. In fact, WSPR is about the only mode that gives me any kind of result on HF these days. (I'm one of those heretics who, while loving digital modes, doesn't care for JT65 and FT8).
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: Strange Beacons on April 26, 2019, 1832 UTC
When I was in my teens my cousin Dave built a low-power MW tx so we could reach the large park and new mall across the river from his house.

I love stories like these! Thanks for sharing it.
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: Josh on April 26, 2019, 2040 UTC
I can't believe our illustrious porcine friend couldn't get propa across the river. Must have been doing it wrong.

A friend did a similar stunt when he was a teen in Iowa. He and a friend ran a long wire over the tops of some trees, a few thousand feet out, fed with 10w or so, they got qsl cards from Canada.
Title: Re: EXPERTS PREDICT A LONG, DEEP SOLAR MINIMUM:
Post by: i_hear_you on June 03, 2019, 1911 UTC
We'd have been better off buying a piece of crap PA system, putting a speaker in the window, and cranking it to the max.

Funny and profound. Not all waves are created equal.