For those of you in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington, I'm launching a new piece, 'The Closed World', next week at the Dominion Observatory. Commissioned for the ADA Symposium, 2024, it has been a very interesting challenge putting this piece together.
I look forward to sharing a project page for The Closed World soon.
Caved and set up the Buddipole. Will see if I can catch any solar bursts on 40m and 20m in radio land. Upconverter on battery to RTLSDR. Living dangerously, straight into lappie, gulp.
Excellent descrip of what I saw last night & into this morning, even during the entry R1 Blackout level. I was surfing the 40/30/20m bands & found an eerie & persistent 'quiet earth' that I had never before seen.
Why? During intense solar storms the lower ionosphere becomes extremely electron-dense, and so radio reliant on ionospheric bounce loses energy - becoming degraded or lost altogether - due to increased collisions in this new high-density environment:
@alex So eerie.. If the noise is even pattern across spectrum, and in/outside the shack, could be line noise (balun, mode choke?). Sometimes moving the SDR to a new host can help, little embedded boards are quietest IME.