Wayne.B wrote in
:

Any sign yet of an upturn in the cycle?

It's an 11 year cycle.... You can watch it on:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml

The most fascinating place about it is at:
http://www.spaceweather.com/
Today's sunspot number is ZERO! NO SUNSPOTS! Arrghh.
Sure glad there's Skype...(c;
Spaceweather can EASILY occupy an entire evening exploring.

Canada accurately tracks the Solar Radio flux on 2.8 Ghz:
http://www.drao-ofr.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc...sol_home.shtml

So, from their prediction graph, it looks like a nice peak in 2012. This
is perfect as that is the year my Socialist Security checks start
rollin' in and I can stop working for all my money and live off the kids
at Mickey D's flipping hamburgers.

Who knows. I might just put W4CSC back on the air...(c;


At night the only thing that's working for me on Winlink/Pactor is
80M.


80 and 160M act more like AM broadcast band than shortwaves. They're
pretty predictable as a good nighttime freq with groundwave only on the
sunny side of the planet. 40M up to 10M is what the solar cycle hits so
hard. I have seen 75M SSB totally unusable for nets a few times. Of
course, to become "net control" on an ARRL net, you must NOT own a proper
ANTENNA or BIG LINEAR AMPLIFIER so you don't sound like you're talking on
a wet string with 10 watts, no matter what the conditions...(c;

I used to be active on the SC SSB net on 3915 many years ago. One night
at net time you couldn't hear hardly anyone it was so bad. At that time,
I was running an old Heathkit HW-100 SSB transceiver (tubes, cheap) and a
home brew little amp I made out of some power company parts and a PAIR of
4-1000A tetrodes in a 7 ft tall old navy transmitter rack, about 4' wide.
Using "minimum power to establish communications" that night meant
running 6000 VDC at about 950ma on the little tubes. That's about a
kilowatt, right?....(c; The AM station down the street ran 200W on 1260
at night in a 3-tower directional array over my house. EJ, the chief
engineer and night DJ at the transmitter building used to call me and ask
if I would hold off transmitting until he read the antenna current meters
wildly moving around too far to fill in his log. He joked I had more
current in his towers than he did...hee hee...(c;

Those were fun days....no money, homebrew everything. I carried a melted
2' section of RG-8A/U coax into a ham club meeting and said they just
don't make coax like they used to....my little amp melted it...(c;

Larry
"POWER is our FRIEND!" (Robert Mitchell, AAA Communications, paging)

"You can tell when your ham station is tuned up, easily, by seeing how
dim the lights are in your neighbor's house." - (me)