Ionospherics

There was a geomagnetic storm today that knocked out all of the 10m+ bands of the Earth’s radio frequencies. While trying to investigate this via the waterfall plots on SDR servers earlier, I stumbled upon a ‘net’ that was taking place in North Texas wherein a group of people were triangulating a 40-mile wide storm cell that was headed East.

The kicker was that these operators were transmitting on the 2m bands given that the ionosphere was out of commission whereas they would otherwise be on the higher frequencies (most of them had their general class HAM licenses).

To top it off, the National Weather Service would interject every once in a while to get field reports from these operators on the aforementioned storm.

So in essence, the sun attacked the Earth and rendered a layer of it’s atmosphere inefficient for reflecting specific vibrations, so these people recalibrated their vibration modulation tools so as to operate under the atmosphere enough such that they could keep other people, including a Federal government agency, up to date on what how the Earth’s atmosphere was impacting their region’s climate. With 125-year-old technology no less.

I find this absolutely fascinating.