Donations are accepted. We appreciate the help!
After years of waiting for the sun to emerge from an extended period of inactivity, the last two months provide hope for ham radio contesters and DX'ers who would like to see the high bands finally kick into gear.
The difference between January 2010 and January 2009 could not be more stark - the first month of last year had only six days with sunspots - in other words - on 25 days, there were no sunspots.
January of 2010 was almost the complete opposite - the sun was blank for only two days in the first month of the New Year.
Even with that increase, relative activity of sunpsots remains low in terms of measured sunspot numbers, one reason that there has not been a major shift in the high bands.
There are some solar experts who focus on the "AP Planetary Index," which measures geomagnetic activty.
It has been falling consistently in recent years to its current value of one.
"Solar physicists have also noticed that the individual magnetic fields of sunspots have also become weaker recently, suggesting the possibility that sunspots may disappear again by as soon as 2015, when they would normally be more numerous at the peak of the 11-year solar cycle," says a report by the Science and Public Policy Insitute.
On February 9, the US space agency NASA will launch a new Solar Dynamics Observatory to study the sun's cycles.
"No solar physicist alive today has experienced a minimum this deep or this long," according to NASA’s Madhulika Guhathakurta.
"SDO will use three science instruments to investigate the connections between the internal workings of the sun and the external effects of our nearest star," says the Nasa.gov website.
Using a special orbit, the satellite will take pictures of the sun every ten seconds for five years, sending back huge volumes of data for solar researchers.
For example, ARRL Contest Manager Sean Kutzko KX9X recently reported several very interesting numbers:
"It is great to see so many hams no just getting on for our contests, but submitting logs in record numbers," Kutzko wrote on his ARRL Contest blog.
Could some of the increase be attributed to computer logging and the ease of submitting electronic logs? Certainly that probably plays a role, but it's not like computers only arrived in the last few years.
RTTY Contesting also continues to explode, with record scores and numbers of logs in the major contest like the ARRL Roundup, CQ WPX RTTY and CQ WW DX RTTY.
"The growth of RTTY and RTTY contesting is phenomenal," says Don Hill AA5AU, who has done his share to spur on that mode with his web site rttycontesting.com.
Over at CQ WW, the SSB and CW contests had over 11,800 logs submitted for the 2009 CQ WW DX tests in those modes, "a great success" said contest director Bob Cox K3EST.
The same holds true in the WPX Contests, where Director Randy Thompson K5ZD has created a bar chart that shows the number of submitted logs taking a big jump in recent years.
The SSB WPX test had 2,540 logs in 2005 - in 2009 that was up to 4,087.
The WPX CW had 2,166 logs in 2005 - in 2009 that was up to 3,148.
All of that during some not so easy times on the HF contest bands.
