Spotless Days......A Blank SUN....

Spaceweather ^ | May 2nd, 2009

[bigheadfred]

RAINADOES! We’re Having one right now! My bar-b-q!

[MainFrame65]

If Congress just passed a law making Pi equal to 3, the sun would be squeezed in the middle, causing sunspots to pop out. But don’t tell Nancy and Harry!

[Fred Hayek]

Bush’s Fault

Hey, the moonbats are still blaming him for everything that goes wrong!

[SuziQ]

Keep those long sleeved shirts available for those cooler evenings this summer!

[SuziQ]

Nekkid Sun ping!

[TaraP]

At least you won’t have a boring bar-b-q!

[spokeshave]

latest sunspot pics at: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/

none today..... :-(

[Rebelbase]

This is just an inconvenient fact for the global warming crowd.

[Clinging Bitterly]

Well - there has been some activity - yesterday even 10M was open for a while, especially the transequatorial path, and today 17, 15, and 12 had quite a bit of activity. But unfortunately I'm not set up for much above 20M right now, mostly because of sucky radiation patterns from my antenna on those bands. I intend to improve that later when things are more consistently open. Last cycle I used a shortened 5/8 vertical CB antenna on 10M and it worked great.

About sundown today the noise floor went way down on 60M, at least on the West coast, and there was a group of guys on 5366.5 in mobiles going home from EMCOM/HAMCOM in Reno, and some others with even portable hand carried gear, most of them running 5-20W. I could hear them for quite a while and it was easy enough to work them at the 50W limit with my non-resonant antenna.

That was great, because it was the first time I have heard any activity on 60 other than government data transmissions, which are quite strong and not filtered out so well by my plain jane transceiver. Good to know a lot of them seem to take Sundays off.

[AlexW]

Lucky for me, I have worked every country, so I nor longer
have to lust for great sunspots. DE W4EX

[Clinging Bitterly]

I never was much into DXing or award collecting, but being on the West coast I have made a lot of trans-Pacific contacts, mostly on 10M. I once answered a ZL call on our local 2M repeater and it turned out he was MM near Hawaii, and I do take some pride in that having poured plenty of my sweat and blood into that particular repeater - and it was a high performance machine - we were (are) the site owner and at the time the only box on the hill so we could push the limits and didn't have to compromise anything beyond having to make our own power. But Bob had to have a good station on his boat too. He was touring the Pacific and over the next several weeks we worked him at many locations near the US West coast off Washington, Oregon, and California - and he was always solid and holding for long ragchews.

Just a few weeks ago I upgraded from Technician to Extra so more of HF is pretty new to me and I'm really just getting my feet wet. My interest these days is what I can do with portable (not necessarily QRP) and rapidly deployable gear. Presently I'm using my old FT747GX and various wire antennas but the RX is woefully inadequate and I really need to upgrade the transceiver. I'm considering the FT857D or something with similar features. Used and cheap of course.

[halfright]

Don't think selling my Icom IC-756 ProIII and AL-1200 hasn't crossed my mind more than once recently. Have 334 ctys on the wall and I am now “not having fun”.