I have always been fascinated by the sun, even as a kid.  Before going
blind, I witnessed a partial sun eclipse.  I have read lots of books and
articles relating to the sun and sun spot activity and, of course, since
licensed in 1966 during a big time of solar activity with out of this world
band openings, not to mention the experience of band black outs while on the
air that lasted for a few minutes when the light particles reached the earth
and washed over the ionosphere, I have experienced a lot of really weird
band conditions.  With the latest sun activity, I have been wondering what
might occur this go around.  The solar peaks I have experience have been
wonderful for hamming so at the bottle of the cycles, like many HF hams, I
get pretty inactive.  The weirdest thing I ever saw, heard actually, was an
Aurora.  I turned on the rig one evening and every signal sounded like it
was under water.  I knew from working a lot of 20 meters, that it was the
sound of artic flutter but this was really bad.  I discovered it was on
every open band.  I went down to 80 meters and tune the entire band from
3500 on up.  Some side band signals were so watery and echoed so badly, you
could not understand what people were saying.  It was so bad, as I tuned
through the CW band, I ran across a friend of mine calling CQ on the 80
meter CW band who lived about 5 miles away from me.  His signal even
fluttered.  I sure hope the sun does not flare with one of them X sized
Coronal Mass Ejections when it is pointed in our direction.  We might get a
really bad sun burn so stock up on sun block and the higher the blockage,
the better.

Phil.
K0NX