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Radiation Storm Lets You Listen Long-Distance
bubblegoose writes: "There is a large radiation storm in progress caused by a solar flare on the backside of the Sun. Here's a story from Spaceweather.
It has a pretty cool effect on radio signals. I was picking up a 6000 Watt North Carolina FM station from near Philly." Bubblegoose also brings you this link to dxing.com, a site all about listening in when freak atmospheric conditions create unusual RF propagation patterns.
If you want to learn more about ionospheric skip, sporadic-E, transmission by meteor scatter (literally bouncing signals off meteors), moonbounce, and other neat ways to communicate long distances by radio, check out Amateur Radio (often called ham radio). One good place to start learning more is at the American Radio Relay League, www.arrl.org. There's a lot of amateur radio stuff on the web.
:)
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Honestly, you can buy or build an inexpensive radio and antenna for peanuts. Some kit radio projects like the "tuna tin" radio can be built in 15 minutes!
While you do need a license, the technician class exam is so easy most slashdotters should be able to pass with no studying. The FCC mandates a fixed question pool from which the questions will be drawn, and these are available on-line. (So are practice tests.) So if you just like to get perfect scores, read all the questions first!
And the exam fee is also mandated by the FCC, currently $10.00, so basically this is very easy to get into.
I hope that a lot of people here are intrigued by the fascinating world of long-distance radio wave propagation. From simple chatting with people in your local area, to talking to Africa and even Antarctica, radio is the only communication system that covers the globe.
Also there's the exciting world of amateur satellites, satellite designed, built, and launched by amateur volunteers and funds. These are another great way for a low-power station to communicate DX (long distance) without much special equipment.
I guess I don't need to add how pleased I am to see radio wave propagation stories on
See you on the air!
Eh.. i shouldn't do this, but.. What the hell.
While screwing up human-created radio patterns is an interesting effect, if the idea of listening to sound generated entirely by natural phenomena emitting radio waves interests you, there is a pretty good writing --> at this url <--, at the everything2 entry for "natural radio". The important thing about this site is that it contains a URL at the end containing recordings of the noise parsed by humans from natural radio. Turns out Mother Nature can create ambient about as evocative as anything we could ever replicate using our primitive tape recording systems..
If anyone else has some related links, btw, (and if y'all feel like it, we could maybe let this thread spiral way offtopic and maybe throw in a couple links regarding Oval, Pole, Farmers Manual or Disc or japanese noise groups, "Numbers Stations", etc..) could you post them as a reply to this?
In specific: The recent (excellent imho) issue of Wire with the cover story on nondeterministic music (or maybe it was the Urb where they interview richie hawtin.. can't remember. whatever.) They had a URL for some page at NASA in which they have sound files up containing natural radio emissions picked up by satellites *orbiting mars*.. with the source of the emissions being martian atmospheric phenomena. Freaky stuff, but it sounded really cool. unfortunately, i have lost that link. anyone have it?