--On Tuesday, July 23, 2002 10:11 PM -0700 Andy Ellifson <andy@ellifson.com> wrote:
**** ( CORRECTED ) MAJOR SUNSPOT ACTITVITY ****
I passed this on to a neighbor for comment wrt 802.11b. His response appears below:
These blackouts generally affect communications in the HF (high frequency) range. This means that frequencies below about 30-40Mhz will be affected. The reason is that the F layers of the ionosphere are used to "skip" signals for long distance communications. The solar storms cause massive disturbances in the ionosphere which cause this "skip" effect to shut down. It is actually impressive to listen to by virtue of the total absence of normal noise, or any other signal, on these bands of frequencies. These frequencies are used, on occasion, for extremely low speed commercial/military digital communications (110 baud).
This should have no effect on us. The R3 classification will shut down HF radio communications for a bit, but the G2 geomagnetic classification is not too bad and should not affect the power grids. Severe geomagnetic storms can shift the magnetic poles by many degrees.
There are many places to get more information about sunspots. Being an amateur radio operator who likes HF communications, I have a bit of an interest in the topic.
The most succinct monitoring and information site I have found is run by a group of short wave listeners in the Netherlands: http://www.dxlc.com/solar/
Many of the measurements used are taken in Boulder (Boulder K index). Nasa usually has some great photos of the big CMEs/Flares