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Science

Radiation Storm Lets You Listen Long-Distance 134

Posted by timothy from the there-are-people-into-everything dept.
bubblegoose writes: "There is a large radiation storm in progress caused by a solar flare on the backside of the Sun. Here's a story from Spaceweather. It has a pretty cool effect on radio signals. I was picking up a 6000 Watt North Carolina FM station from near Philly." Bubblegoose also brings you this link to dxing.com, a site all about listening in when freak atmospheric conditions create unusual RF propagation patterns.
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Radiation Storm Lets You Listen Long-Distance More

Radiation Storm Lets You Listen Long-Distance

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  • If you think this is cool, check out Ham radio (Score:5, Informative)

    by moebius_4d ( 26199 ) on Friday August 17, 2001 @10:36AM (#2110475) Journal
    If you want to learn more about ionospheric skip, sporadic-E, transmission by meteor scatter (literally bouncing signals off meteors), moonbounce, and other neat ways to communicate long distances by radio, check out Amateur Radio (often called ham radio). One good place to start learning more is at the American Radio Relay League, www.arrl.org. There's a lot of amateur radio stuff on the web.

    Honestly, you can buy or build an inexpensive radio and antenna for peanuts. Some kit radio projects like the "tuna tin" radio can be built in 15 minutes!

    While you do need a license, the technician class exam is so easy most slashdotters should be able to pass with no studying. The FCC mandates a fixed question pool from which the questions will be drawn, and these are available on-line. (So are practice tests.) So if you just like to get perfect scores, read all the questions first! :)
    And the exam fee is also mandated by the FCC, currently $10.00, so basically this is very easy to get into.

    I hope that a lot of people here are intrigued by the fascinating world of long-distance radio wave propagation. From simple chatting with people in your local area, to talking to Africa and even Antarctica, radio is the only communication system that covers the globe.

    Also there's the exciting world of amateur satellites, satellite designed, built, and launched by amateur volunteers and funds. These are another great way for a low-power station to communicate DX (long distance) without much special equipment.

    I guess I don't need to add how pleased I am to see radio wave propagation stories on /. :)

    See you on the air!

  • Wow! (Score:2)

    by joshv ( 13017 )
    Yesterday I dialed into the internet with my modem and within a few seconds I was chatting with a girl from Singapore (well, at least she said she was a girl). Must be some radiation storm! Cool!

  • The links between this and the movie Frequency are quite staggering. In the movie, during an Aurora Borealis allows radio waves to communicate into to the past.

    An interesting link is that the Aurora Borealis in itself is a form of radiation.

    Here's a definition:
    "The Aurora Borealis is atmospheric conditions being in the correct alignment to see radiation in the visible from the high-energy electrons following diallel lines and causing atmospheric molecules to move to an excited energy state -- after which they emit in the visible, which we see."

  • Several years ago I was able to receive in Miami, a great signal from a 1KW transmitter located in Rome, NY...AM band, 1530khz I think...

    Also, during that same period, I was able to get both sides of a baseball game between Detroit and Baltimore, on their local AM stations...WTOP out of DC I think and I don't remember the Detroit station...My logs are at home in a closet...

    Got a write up in Monitoring Times...

  • Any CB/Ham operator knows it's called... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Skip
    • CBers call it skip. It's illegal to work skip with CB.

      Hams call it DX :)

    • This is behaves the same way. Except this is on much higher freqencies than CB. CB is expected to bounce like shortwave. These signals bounce when they arent suposed to, due to strange occurances in our atmosphere. Even meteors. Read the article before you post please.

      -Temporal Reverse Engineering Inc: If you need us we will call you last week

      • Tropospheric ducting.

        It works all the way up into the UHF television stations. There are cases of people in New England picking up Florida broadcast television stations right after a tropical storm passes up the coast.

  • Let me warn yuo all, if a chimp attempts to fly into this thing, whatever you do, don't fly into it after him, or you'll end up on that damn dirty ape planet like in that movie that had a screwey ending!

  • For those of us in Atlanta (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sunfist ( 514813 ) on Friday August 17, 2001 @04:21AM (#2120109)
    "I was picking up a 6000 Watt North Carolina FM station from near Philly"

    For those of us in Atlanta, I know I picked up a Cuban station earlier. I don't know how far away this can be heard, because I haven't traveled around checking it out. I'm a little rusty on my Spanish, but it seems to be a Communist Propoganda station. It's crazy!

    • Natsukashii! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by wirefarm ( 18470 ) <jim@mmdCOWc.net minus herbivore> on Friday August 17, 2001 @10:53AM (#2133187) Homepage
      When I was a kid in the early seventies, I used to build radios - Crystal sets and hacked together tube radios from parts in the family attic. One of my lucky finds was a 1950's bakelite shortwave radio - something with 'wave' in its name, I think can't quite remember it now. Had a funky antenna that fit into the top, I remember...
      I got the damn thing working after frequent trips to Radio Shack's free 'Tube Tester' and a lot of experimentation. (Try any tube with the right number of pins... Replace resistors that had gone black - Victory garden walls and all...)
      Got the thing working and my brother and I would stay up late listening to Radio Moscow's propoganda. Brilliant, abstract stuff; The boy scouts were a paramilitary training group and the US govt was making sausage out of Native Americans. The woman who read the news sounded a bit like Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoons.
      Of course, we always switched over then to Dr. Demento when that came on...
      A couple years ago on an Aeroflot plane to Moscow, I sat next to a former KGB agent and we drank vodka together and talked about how we missed the cold war. I told him about listening to the 'Voice of Moscow' or whatever it was called. We both agreed that international animosity had reached a certain level of respectability and taste with the cold war.
      I asked him if they had the good movies that we did - he called them 'Spymaster' movies, but the ones he told me about only had the west Germans as the opponent - never the Americans, (Too bad. Either he was sparing my feelings, or we weren't as significant as we thought we were... I suspect the former.)

      That was a time that really turned me on to communication and technology. Hearing a voice from so far away on a hunk of wires that I had badly cobbed together from cast-off parts. Hearing that series of tones that helped you tune in to the station before the broadcast.
      I hope right now, some kid is sitting in his room, burning his fingers with a soldering iron over a pile of junk parts, finally hearing a crackle and then a voice.
      I can't imagine a better thrill...

      Cheers,
      Jim (Now far away...)
    • 1977 - Reversed the channel 14 crystals in my 1.5 watt CB hand-held. The new, clear channel was then known as "Crazy Charlie". Despite being the height of a solar flare cycle, I was still amazed when discovered I was chatting with an individual in Jamaica while I was outside Philadelphia, PA.

      1977 was a good year for DXing. Routinely spoke with folks well outside the normally extremely limited range of 1-2 miles with this handheld.

      RD

  • I live in southern California and my guitar amp was picking up some Korean radio station loud and clear. It's pretty cool, but makes it rather difficult to practice :P
  • Beyond the cool factor, listening to far-away radio stations is pretty mundane for me, thanks to this little thing called the internet :)

    I'd be much more interested in just how far south the Northern Lights are showing up over the next day or two... up here at 50deg N, we seem them all the time.

  • short rambling on Natural Radio (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17, 2001 @03:38AM (#2127567)
    Eh.. i shouldn't do this, but.. What the hell.

    While screwing up human-created radio patterns is an interesting effect, if the idea of listening to sound generated entirely by natural phenomena emitting radio waves interests you, there is a pretty good writing --> at this url [everything2.com] <--, at the everything2 entry for "natural radio". The important thing about this site is that it contains a URL at the end containing recordings of the noise parsed by humans from natural radio. Turns out Mother Nature can create ambient about as evocative as anything we could ever replicate using our primitive tape recording systems..

    If anyone else has some related links, btw, (and if y'all feel like it, we could maybe let this thread spiral way offtopic and maybe throw in a couple links regarding Oval, Pole, Farmers Manual or Disc or japanese noise groups, "Numbers Stations", etc..) could you post them as a reply to this?

    In specific: The recent (excellent imho) issue of Wire with the cover story on nondeterministic music (or maybe it was the Urb where they interview richie hawtin.. can't remember. whatever.) They had a URL for some page at NASA in which they have sound files up containing natural radio emissions picked up by satellites *orbiting mars*.. with the source of the emissions being martian atmospheric phenomena. Freaky stuff, but it sounded really cool. unfortunately, i have lost that link. anyone have it?

  • I was able to pick a Cimmaron, Kansas radio station in Big Stone Gap Virginia about 6 weeks ago.

    • We seem to live in a pretty good area for that -- about eight or nine years ago I pulled in a VHF TV signal from Kansas City for a couple of hours in Wise. My physics professor at the time (Bill H., if you remember him) saw the same phenomenon that morning and was so worked up about it he devoted a good part of his lecture telling us why it was happening.
  • I was driving to work, and some other radio station was interfering with me listening to Howard Stern. I was pretty upset. They was giving the news or something too... grrrrr

    What ever happened to Pepsi free?
  • So if it were February we'd all be wondering why the Internet was completely disrupted? The halo created by the flare is pretty significant.

    Dancin Santa
  • ...actually at college on the (flat) eastern shore of Maryland, about 10 years ago, for one foggy evening and subsequent morning, we got about 30 TV stations (mostly UHF) from up and down the coast as far as North Carolina, and as far north as Connecticut. It was cool watching a Hartford TV station that morning. When I got back from classes it was back to normal. I shit you not.

  • My Uncle (Score:2, Funny)

    by ReidMaynard ( 161608 )
    Pictured here [krazysurfer.com] can pick up stations from clear around the world!

    Unfortunately, we only get audio when he puts a megaphone against his teeth ... we're trying to figure a way to get video too ...

  • WRVA Richmond,Virginia from Toronto (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BigBlockMopar ( 191202 ) on Friday August 17, 2001 @03:29AM (#2133066) Homepage

    I was picking up a 6000 Watt North Carolina FM station from near Philly

    Today, WRVA, Richmond, Virginia. Crystal clear DX reception in Toronto. On the original made-in-September-1975 Motorola AM radio (with 8-track!) on the dashboard of my 1976 Dodge Ram. Very cool.

    • While working in Hawaii on the island of Oahu, one evening on the way home I picked up a Texas Rangers post game show on the car radio, loud and clear. For the curious, it was 50KW(I think) WBAP 820 back then.

      At first I was flabbergasted, what in the world is some Hawaiian radio station doing talking about the Rangers? Then I recognized some of the broadcasters' voices and finally heard a station ID.

      Then I was really amazed.
    • I used to have a copies of White's Radio Log, which listed stations by frequency, call letters and listed wattage; also a big US map and was going to do a project to place pins on it of all the AM stations I could identify. Though I never got the map on the wall and pins put in it, I did record stations in a notebook.

      When the Ionosphere would drop on summer nights, I'd be up until about midnight, recording stations as I could identify them. Some would come in strong for a few minutes, and fade, others would oscillate between clear and gone with a period as short as a half second or as long as a few minutes.

      I lived in Midland, Michigan and recorded 5,000 watt stations from Clearwater, Florida and a couple in Texas. I was a frequent listener of WOWO, Ft Wayne, IN and WWWE Cleveland, OH when things got too squirrely. (This all started as me being a rabid baseball fanatic when I was 12 and scanning the dial for any game, once the Tiger's game was over)

      For anyone with nothing better to do, particularly kids, this would probably be a fun summer project, however, two suggestions:

      Go to a Hamfest (Amature Radio Swap 'n Shop) and get yourself a tube receiver (Hallicrafters, Hammerlund, Heathkit...), these old beasts still have the lowest noise and best sensitivity.

      Keep your antenna away from Cable TV lines, Computers, Floresent lights, Lamp dimmers, or anything else which generates RFI.

      Have fun! :-)


      • Go to a Hamfest (Amature Radio Swap 'n Shop) and get yourself a tube receiver (Hallicrafters, Hammerlund, Heathkit...), these old beasts still have the lowest noise and best sensitivity.

        Oh yeah. I have a 1947 Hallicrafters S-40 [dxing.com] shortwave radio. It's an *ugly* beast, but since I've replaced all the capacitors in it and realigned it with the original shop manual, man, it is stable and clean and it can suck in stations from anywhere.

        I used to have a balanced rhombic antenna attached to it, and that really helped it. The antenna was aimed right across the American heartland from Ottawa, Canada, and it would pick up Aussie shortwave services without a problem.

        Between my old Dodge Ram [nedworksal.nl], my Hallicrafters radio and my old TI-99/4A [glowingplate.com], I can tell you for sure, they don't build 'em like they used to. [sigh]

        • S-40, yep, my brother has one of them. My dad has probably one more on a shelf in the basement, too. My favorite was a Wells-Gardner BC-348 which was mounted in a relay rack.

          • S-40, yep, my brother has one of them. My dad has probably one more on a shelf in the basement, too.

            Mine's got some neat proof that hardware hacking didn't originate with computers.

            The S-40 had an 80 rectifier tube powering it, about 350V B+ to the rest of the tubes.

            Mine, on the other hand, was modified. Nice ceramic socket (different from the rest of the radio's sockets), hole neatly punched into the chassis. The new wiring is almost indistinguishable from the original radio, but it was clearly done when the radio was still nearly new - 1947-1955, somewhere in that range.

            The tube that was added is a VR150 gas regulator, and the regulated B+ is fed to the RF amp, local oscillator, IF, AVC and detector stages. The only part of it on non-regulated B+ is the audio amplifier and output.

            An electrodynamic speaker (early 1940s vintage) was fitted into the set in place of the original permanent magnet speaker, and the new speaker's field coil is hooked up where a power supply choke would be, if the radio had one.

            It's all a very nice hack, looks original, was done with period parts when the radio was new. And it improves stability like you couldn't imagine: pop out the voltage regulator tube and it starts to drift. With the tube in, it's rock-solid stable and steady.

            I'm wondering if it was a common hack, maybe covered in QST magazine or something. Do either of your S-40s have that mod?

    • En route from Pittsburgh to Chicago in March, a friend and I managed to pick up WSBK in Atlanta and some New Orleans station broadcasting a Louisiana State University baseball game. We were in Indiana at the time, 500+ miles from Atlanta and 800+ miles from New Orleans. The next week, I asked my astronomy professor whether the recent sunstorm might have caused that, and he said that it's quite possible.
    • Until this story I had never heard of this before. I now think that it is the probable explanation for why I was once able to briefly pick up KRPC - Channel 2 from Houston from my home in Tucson, AZ. I was never able to reproduce it, so nobody believed me when I described it. Ha, now I know the truth.
    • In the mid-1970's, when I was living in Frederciton, New Brunswick (Atlantic Canada), I was able to receive a TV station from Nashville, Tennesee. The reception was a bit snowy, but it lasted for a couple of days. I made an audio recording of the reception and still have that tape lying around.
    • I used to scan for out-of-town stations all the time driving from NYC to my brother's house in Long Beach, Long Island. It seems that at night, with few sources of electromagnetic radiation (from powerlines, etc.) you can pick up distant stations with astonishing regularity. I used to listen to stations as far away as Charlotte (1300 AM) and Atlanta (750 AM).
    • I was driving to work in Nova Scotia a few years ago and the Halifax station about 60 miles away seemed to be coming very clearly... then I heard the DJ identify it as an Augusta station. Hmmm, I thought, that's cool, Augusta Maine. Nope, it was Austa Georgia, very authentic as they had a local news story about fishing someone out of a river who had been fitted with concrete shoes :-)

      • Years ago, on long drives, we'd sometimes be able to pick up distant radio stations in the crummy radio in our Dart. The record was a New Orleans station we picked up in central Indiana. Getting to hear Wolfman Jack (before his death) doing an oldies show [what else!] was better than the bad country or Bible-thumping you'd normally have to listen to.

        ``Austa (sic) Georgia, very authentic as they had a local news story about fishing someone out of a river who had been fitted with concrete shoes''

        Rubes. Concrete shoes went out of fashion is big cities like Chicago and New York decades ago. :-)

  • Trop vs skip (Score:3, Informative)

    by n3hat ( 472145 ) on Friday August 17, 2001 @10:56AM (#2134504)
    Long distance vhf reception may be the result of ionospheric conditions (sporadic E skip, e.g.). A more common cause in my experience is tropospheric ducting ("trop"). Trop creates a waveguide in the atmosphere. It is often caused by a temperature inversion.
    Although the speed of light is nearly as fast in air as it is in a vacuum, it does differ slightly. And it is lower in dense, cool air than in thin, warm air. In other words, the refractive index of cool air is higher that of warm air. The signals are bent back to earth when they hit a discontinuity in the refractive index caused by a layer of warm air overlaying a region of cool air. Inversion layers commonly form on cool, clear nights. So you will often hear anomalous FM reception in the morning -- distant stations heard between local stations, or even interfering with weak locals.
    A Yahoo search on "temerature inversion radio propagation" [yahoo.com] will enlighten the curious - this [ips.gov.au] is one result. Or run to the library and look in "The Radio Amateur's Handbook".
  • Ok so cross interference may be nifty and all, however I have lived about 1 mile away from Voice of America in West Chester Ohio. Let me tell you something, when you hear people talking Spanish on your computer speakers which aren't in use at the moment...it is freaky.
  • This isn't a rare phenomena for some people living along the California Coast (as the article mentions). Growing up in the Santa Barbara area, we had a very nice signal for Television stations from San Diego/Tijuana (about 200 miles away). Actually, the signal there was usually a LOT stronger than signals from Los Angeles (about 100 miles away). This is a Good Thing, as Santa Barbara only has 1 TV station. The reason for this being that Santa Barbara is a straight shot over the ocean from SD.

    Other propagation stuff:

    When I was doing a lot of HAM stuff (back during the last Solar Maximum), I could sometimes get some real distance at the HF frequencies, on small amounts of power. I was able to hit Argentina with 10W on 40 meters, and was able to hit all across the US with 1 watt sometimes (also at 40M), just on a plain old dipole antenna. Most hams are familiar with this, I guess, but to a kid in Jr. High it was pretty cool! :)

    A friend of family was able to go from Santa Barbara to the midwest (Indianapolis maybe?) on something ridiculous like 10mW. It was (and may still be) some sort of record for distance/power.

    Foley
    N6RWE

  • javaradio (Score:3, Informative)

    by awptic ( 211411 ) <infiniteNO@SPAMcomplex.com> on Friday August 17, 2001 @03:33AM (#2135374)
    www.javaradio.com [javaradio.com] has links to several shortwave receivers around the world connected to the internet. The lag between the audio and the controls is horrible, if you can bare with that it can be quite interesting.

  • 'Frequency' (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Friday August 17, 2001 @03:37AM (#2135378)
    As an aside, the particular effect was one of the key 'reason for being' points of the movie Frequency [imdb.com].

    You can go click the link for a summary of the movie. Fairly decent flick, got too wrapped up in funny timetravellish things, and how the radios magically did not need the TX buttons pushed anymore was particually annoying.

    • I haven't seen the film, so don't pounce on my too much. Realize, though, that it is possible to talk without having a TX button... it's called vox. Voice activiated transmissions. Kind of useful and handy. Unfortunately, none of my ham rigs support it.
      • Yes, but the radio used in frequency was originally from the 50's, I don't know if vox was as common as then. Not to mention that they started off using the PTT button and then through the movie it got less and less use. By the end of the movie it was a "magical" vox button.

    • Re:'Frequency' (Score:3, Informative)

      by jnik ( 1733 )
      As an aside, the particular effect was one of the key 'reason for being' points of the movie Frequency.
      Actually no. What's happening now is standard ionospheric skip, just on higher-than usual frequencies becuase of higher ionization levels. "Frequency" was about Long Delayed Echoes, where you'll pick up a transmission from years or even decades ago. LDE's still aren't fully explained; the difficulty of course is that in order to pick up a ten-year old signal you need either some sort of store-resend mechanism (aliens on the moon!) or the signal needs to travel a distance the same as to Proxima and back. And still be audible.
  • I'm jelous. I can't even pickup local radio in my car! And here you guys across the country could be listening to my local radio. Life is so unfair.

  • AM != FM (Score:4, Informative)

    by ebh ( 116526 ) <ed.horch@org> on Friday August 17, 2001 @12:20PM (#2138043) Journal
    It's nothing special to have AM broadcasts travel long distances at night--it's an inherent property of that frequency range. You'll sometimes hear about "50,000 watt clear channel" stations. For each AM broadcast frequency, one station in the US has permission to crank up their transmitter to 50KW, and every other station on that frequency in the country either has to drastically lower their power or go off the air altogether, hence the existence of dawn-to-disk AM stations. (I remember one AM station that broadcast road conditions for all major US Interstates, since they knew that their signal could be heard all over North America at that time of night.)

    "Skip" (explained in other posts) is common in the HP range (3-30MHz), but much less so in the VHF range (30-300MHz). HF's skip characteristics are varied depending on frequency, but fairly predictable. Hams talk of "maximum usable frequency" (MUF), which deals with the less-predictable frequencies in the upper parts of HF and lower parts of VHF. It is significant to hams when the MUF tops 50MHz, because that allows skip traffic over 6 meters (50-54MHz-so THAT's what happened to channel 1!), which most of the time is restricted to line-of-sight.

    On rare occasions, such as during this radiation storm, the MUF can go past 150MHz, allowing skip for FM broadcast, 2-meter (144-148MHz) ham, and many of the VHF broadcast TV channels.

    It can be loads of fun seeing what all you can pick up on your FM radio which this happens.

    • Actually, I believe that TV channel 1 was around 46-50 MHz, or something close. It was definitely lower than the 50-54 MHz ham band.

      http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/propagation.html has a whole host of links to articles about propagation modes, including [arrl.org]this [wulfden.org], and this article [arrl.org] from QST.

      Generally, HF (3-30 MHz) skip (off the F-region of the ionosphere) is a function of solar activity, with the MUF occaisionally rising into the VHF region as ebh above states.

      For VHF (50-300 MHz), skip of the E-region (Sporadic-E) is the most common skip. This is not a function of solar activity, and occurs randomly for (usually) short periods. Most long distance VHF communication is due to tropospheric conditions.

      50-54 MHz is known as the 'magic band' because it happens to support a range of different propogation phenomena, F-skip like lower frequencies, sporadic-E, tropospheric propagation, meteor bounce, aurora bounce, moonbounce (really difficult at 50MHz, easier as you get higher), and some *really* funky others (transequatorial-F, field-aligned-irregularities) that you will have to look up elsewhere. The ARRL handbooks are *really* good sources of info.

      As TV channel 2 is only just above 54 MHz, then the time to look for long distance TV reception is when conditions are good for the 6m (50-54 MHz) HAM band.

      AM radio is at a very low frequency, and so it's behaviour will be similar to that of the 160m (1.8-2.0 MHz) ham band. F-skip of AM radio will be best at night.

      This link [arrl.org] has monthly charts of expected f-skip propagation showing what time of day is the best to listen for various frequencies. For AM radio, you are interested in the Lowest Usable Frequency getting as low as possible, whilst F-skip on TV channels 2-4 is only possible during the day when the solar flux is *very* high, so as now, hopefully. E-skip on VHF TV channels, and FM radio is possible pretty much any time during daylight though.

      If anyone sees any mistakes I've made, please feel free to correct them,

      Alan

    • One example of a "clear channel" station, is WJR (760) here in Detroit MI. They run 50kW 24 hours a day. After dark while travelling, I used to listen to hockey games. I've heard it as far away as Dallas TX. (fluttering a bit with a spanish station, but mostly understandable.)
      From what I understand, it's possible with the right conditions to hear these high powered stations from thousands of miles away.

      A handy resource for finding out where that station is that you're listening to, is the FCC databases. They're moving stuff into a new system called CDBS, but it's harder to search.
      For AM: http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/asd/amq.html
      For FM: http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/asd/fmq.html
      For TV: http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/vsd/tvq.html
      You can see their allowed power (day/night for AM), transmitter location, antenna height...
      Lots of neat stuff.

  • Not the Sun at all (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The solar flare had nothing to do with this. What you are hearing is tropospheric ducting. Being a ham, the 2m and 70cm bands have had tropo the past two days because of the warm days and cool nights. I live near Philly and have been working stations further south then I do most of the time because of this. It has been very strong. This site dxing.com [dxing.com] explains what tropo and Sporadic-E are. Tropo has nothing to do with the sun but Sporadic-E does. The distance between Philly and NC is kinda short for Sporadic-E. Also Sporadic-E doesn't last for long periods of time.
  • Um, anybody in orbit right now? How are they doing?
    • There's always someone in orbit now -- ISS is permanently manned. There's also a shuttle in space, delivering a new space station crew among other things. Presumably they're doing OK -- they had a space walk yesterday, according to Excite's news feed [excite.com].
    • Uh. For the past fifteen YEARS, at all times, there has been someone in orbit. Usually three someones. They were called cosmonauts, and they were on Mir or the Salyut stations that preceeded it. The only time in the last fifteen years in which there might NOT have been anyone in orbit was the period of time between the last Mir crew and the first ISS crew. Other than that, at all times during the last fifteen years, we Americans could sleep peacefully knowing that three cosmonauts orbited above our heads.
  • Ye'd think a solar flare would just come right along and totally disrupt Internet communication on the specific ports that Half-Life uses. With all the CounterStrike kiddies off the net for a couple days, I could actually manage to check my email without a five minute wait.
  • I've got a little Grundig receiver and it's been performing exceptionally well (it's always surprisingly good). I guess this is why. Shortwave: the Internet of the previous generation.
    • Oh yes, my friend, grundigs are great. I imagine you are refering to a solid state model. You should hear their classic vacuum tube radios.

      they tune in like ten, clean amplification and offered exceptional AM reception too, with directional ferrite.

      --Not to mention many (all?) had electrostats for the highs, good eqs and tuning eye tubes

      ---oh wait, this isn't the vintage radio discussion :| ---

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Wayyy long distance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Manuka ( 4415 ) on Friday August 17, 2001 @09:54AM (#2154716) Homepage
    I remember at the peak of the last solar cycle, back in the 80's, there was a radiation storm that knocked out a good chunk of the power grid in Quebec. During that storm, I was receiving FM broadcasts from Germany and the UK. It churned up some pretty kickass Aurora Borealis too.
    • Chalmers: (notices kitchen is on fire) Good Lord, what is happening in there?
      Skinner: Aurora Borealis?
      Chalmers: Aurora Borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within your kitchen?
      Skinner: Yes.
      Chalmers: May I see it?
      Skinner: Oh, erm... No.
  • I was on 2m yesterday and happened upon some stations on Colorado and Wyoming. The band seems pretty open from here -- at least it's the best I've seen in the past 5 years or so. Oh yeah, I should note that I'm in central Iowa.

    N0YWI

  • OhMiGod!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 )
    There are holes in the sun's corona !!! We must force the US to sign international treasties, abandon all industrial activity and revert to an agrarian society immediately before it's too late!!
  • As long as we're all posting our "best of's" I thought I would toss mine into the mix:

    AM station out of Chicago: WBBM 780. Picked it up in Denver.

    I was pretty impressed.
  • Does this mean I can now listen to Radio Free Europe, and hear The Drifters sing "On Broadway" ?
  • For those who are interested, you can watch HF propagation conditions in real-time from the SuperDARN radars here. [jhuapl.edu]. Also check this [jhuapl.edu] out.

  • ISS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The Original Atrox ( 449206 )
    Wonder what this does to the Internation Space Station. Discovery is currently docked with it, with a Progress resuply vessel on its tail when it leaves. Wonder if they plan for disruptions in communications due to these Solar Flare radations. I can imagine it would play havoc with any transmissions intended to cut right on through the Ionisphere. The station is also about 240 miles up, that makes transmission even more tricky, not only do you have to punch out of our atmosphere, but you gotta be pointing at exactly the right pin-prick point in space... Ohh well, leave it up to nasa to solve. They always do. (Even if they have to jerryrig something).

    -"I know you all. Even if I have never met you." -The Mentor

    • Re:ISS (Score:1)

      by fatboy ( 6851 )
      Not sure about the ISS, but The Shuttle uses S-Band [nasa.gov] and I doubt the MUF will get high enough to block S-Band.
    • I would have thought that the high-energy collisions of the protons with the hull of the ISS would have neccessitated a shelter of some sort. Apparantly not. Two of the new crew were out swimming in protons [nytimes.com] yesterday.

      (NYT, registration required)
      http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science /AP-Space-S huttle.html

      Anyone know what's going on?

      jaz

    • The simple solution to ionospheric problems is to go to higher frequencies. UHF (300-3000 MHz) or higher are moslty imune to these problems and I'm quite sure that ISS and the Shuttle have UHF and microwave (1 GHz-Infra Red) frequencies available. In fact it's almost certain that most space communication takes place at these frequencies.

      Amateur Radio stations aboard the now toasted Mir, Shuttle, ISS and other satellites use(d) frequencies from VHF (30 MHz -300 MHz)and up. even during solar events, VHF and upper HF frequencies will probably penetrate the ionosphere if the entry angle is steep enough.

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