Friday, December 18, 2020

Sun goes back to sleep - 18th Dec 2020

Back in November and early December, it looked as if the sun had finally woken up from its long slumber of solar minimum as the solar flux climbed about 100. At the time, there were some nice openings on the higher HF bands including 10-metres.


It now looks as old Sol has turned over and gone back to sleep. The Solar Flux on the 18th of December 2020 was at 82 and the map above shows what I heard on FT8 today on 28 MHz. It's certainly no better than what it might have been 12-months ago when we were at the sunspot minimum.

It will probably wake up again in a few weeks but it's probably a timely reminder that it's a bumpy road out of solar minimum.

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