Nasa reported today that the sun isn’t broken after all. Whew!
I learned a few things about the inner workings of the sun by reading this article:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/17jun_jetstream.htm?list1061202
The sun has an internal “jet stream” that shifts latitude with the solar cycle. It’s been sluggish, but they’ve now seen it move back to where it should be headed [...]
Sunspot #1016 was just identified – it’s interesting for several reasons:
It’s a Cycle 23 spot… this means that Solar Cycle 23 has now lasted roughly 13 years.
It’s May 1st and we’ve already had 104 days without sunspots. 88% of 2009 has been without sunspots and now we get one but it’s from the [...]
Our long drought without a sunspot appears to be over.
In case you don’t follow space weather conditions, August marked the first calendar month completed without a single sunspot since 1913. This long streak of days without a sunspot made for some poor HF (high frequency radio) propagation conditions. While it was certainly possible to [...]
Propfire, the Firefox radio/solar propagation data plugin that displays sunspot/prop data in the status bar, is now (finally) compatible with Firefox version 3.0. I had sent a plea for help to the developer community as some major changes to the browser had led to a number of issues. Trevor Hobson kindly offered to review my [...]
January 4, 2008 was a big day in the world of HF radio propagation. Sunspot #10,981 was declared to be the first of Solar Cycle #24. This means decent ham radio propagation is going to get much better over the coming months. After such an extended period of no activity followed by a glimmer of [...]
As many of us are loading the car and shuttling kids to grandma’s house for Christmas festivities, we’re preparing ourselves for that infamous question… “Are we there yet?”
HF ham radio enthusiasts are undoubtedly asking something similar of Sol. Hitting the bottom of the sunspot cycle trough between cycle 23 and cycle 24 has tested [...]
For some strange reason (still unknown to me), the DXpedition Map and PropagationStats had stopped updating. There’s a lot of php code behind the scenes that I’ve used to create some of these tools and I guess I needed to convert to the new PHP version (5.X) to restore order. My ISP has warned that [...]
The blizzard here in central Iowa has left me some free time for programming.
DXpedition Map
The first in line for an update was the DXpedition map. For some reason, this drew the attention of some lids http://www.eham.net/links/rating/10338 who took the opportunity to bash the page. Either they:
haven’t figured out what the page was about (don’t know [...]
Well it took a bit of creativity, but I was able to resolve the issue with Propstats. The scripts that run in the background should now require much less CPU by my webhost. I learned a few php tricks along the way that may be of use in the future.
PropagationStats should again be fully functional [...]
My ISP (icdsoft) has disabled the php script that drove Propstats. So, for the time being, the propagation statistics are not going to be displayed via Propstats. Apparently, so many folks were using it that the php was consuming a lot of CPU behind the scenes (every time a page was loaded that displayed propstats [...]
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