Speaking of the Maunder Minimum, for those of you who are so inclined, there is
an interesting juried paper published online in Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45584-3
arguing that we are entering the next “Grand Minimum” which should run from
2019 through 2055. Even if I outlive it, I certainly won’t be on the air :-(
That and K0CAT’s very informative series of articles in Lenoir, NC ARC online
newsletter beginning 6/2017, chronicling his adventures raising his tower and
antennas, has dampened my enthusiasm for jumping right in to tackle my first
tower, now that I’m past my mid-sixties. Will adopt a “wait and see” attitude
and play with wire antennas in the tall firs for a few years and hope that
cycle 25 is close to cycle 24 (hope NOAA is right) or (dare I hope) even
better, rather than just staying where we are for the rest of my life. (See the
Wikipedia article on Maunder Minimum which cites 19th century papers by Sporer
stating from 1672 to 1699 there were a total of 50 sunspots observed in the
twenty five years; 1,000x less that what would be normal for a 25 year period.)
What do you think guys? Say it ain’t so!
(Otherwise may have to focus on data modes with forward error correcting codes
and operate below the noise level, or maybe get into VHF DXing, but have always
loved the magic of HF and the Ionisphere)
73,
Ken WC6Y
> On Sep 11, 2019, at 6:16 AM, jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> On 9/11/19 6:05 AM, Don Havlicek wrote:
>> There have been minor sunspot regions in the past year, but nothing
>> sustaining.
>> 73
>> Don
>> N8DE
>> Sent from my Verizon Motorola Smartphone
>> On Sep 10, 2019 9:45 PM, john@kk9a.com wrote:
>>>
>>> Wow, what is the record? I guess I haven't missed much being QRT
>>> since the March WPX contest:)
>>>
>>> John KK9A - PJ4R
>>>
>>>
>
>
> The record? Probably the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715
>
> And as always, there's some discussion in the scientific community about what
> constitutes a sunspot, what the correlation between sunspot number (or
> Smoothed Sunspot number) and solar activity is, etc.
>
> The propagation models all take SSN as an input, but what really affects the
> ionosphere is the intensity of the UV light falling on it - unfortunatately,
> there were no orbiting satellites to measure UV insolation nor any ionosondes
> back then, so counting visible sunspots serve as a proxy for solar activity.
>
>
>
>
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