Friday, October 25, 2013

Lots Going On

Lots happening while I'm engaged in other stuff (Murphy, after all):

1. Solar Cycle 24 may be peaking.  The sun is very active today (25 October), and two X class flares occurred overnight (US time).  The second one caused HF in the eastern US to black out all the way to 10 meters for a brief time.

2. Ken Reitz has made the formal announcement of Monitoring Times's successor publication, an all-electronic magazine called The Spectrum Monitor.  Yes, I'll be writing for it.  My column will be called Utility Planet.  The logs will be published on this blog, however.  It's more timely, and a lot less work for me.

3. The logs will change in one other way.  I'll stop using (by written permission) the ones posted on other mailing lists.  This means that intercepts from UDXF and other mailing lists will stay on those lists, instead of being republished.  This just makes more sense with an electronic publication. Why not get them first hand, and with more discussion of what they mean than I'd ever have room to do?

4. Logs sent to the column e-mail address will be published, of course. This address is not changing.  That's too much trouble.  It remains mtutilityworld followed by a commercial at sign followed by the top level domain for Google gmail. (Spam has made one of my accounts useless, so now I don't run the actual addresses online.)

5. Late October - Early November is sometimes known as the "fall DX season."  All the solar activity should make this year's period quite interesting.  Send in your hits.