Is this the beginning of a new Solar Cycle?

Sun's activity is low, but there are signs of a new cycle starting, as solar physicists say. The source of the excitement is a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun's eastern limb on 11th December. Read more here. We're in the bottom of the solar activity for a long time now... so just cross your fingers and hope the scientists are correct!

Emission for syntony Valparaiso Playa Ancha Radio CBV

A better "tuning aid chart" received today. While this is better than the previous one, still needed image processing (slant fix) and it's not complete. It is obvious I got the final part of the transmitted "chart".

8678 kHz, 2247z

The following transmissions were noisy so I didn't uploaded any of them. Again it is a stormy day, we had 2 X-ray flares within 20 hours.

3-day Solar-Geophysical Forecast issued Dec 14 at 22:00UTC

Solar Activity Forecast: Solar activity is expected to be moderate to high. Isolated X-class flares from Region 930 remains a possibility.

Geophysical Activity Forecast: The geomagnetic field is expected to range from active to major storm levels for 15 December. This activity is due to the CME observed on 13 December. Unsettled to active conditions are expected for 16 and 17 December.

That's not a promising forecast... It really discourages me from hunting other HF-Fax transmission from distant places... But right now I have Louisiana... Stay tuned...

Major Solar Storm

The sun is shining outside, but that kills ionosphere!

I am still scratching my head... Where are my signals? Turning on the radio brought nothing but noise! Blame the antenna again! But that's wasn't the culprit. Medium wave signals were there; so something else is wrong.

Fellow listeners informed me that a major solar flare wiped out everything below 15 MHz. My favorite mystery signals were gone. Even Athens FAX was mediocre. But DDK7 still reaches me with a nice clean signal.

You can see the great spike (Bang!) in the image. Well don't forget that the vertical scale is logarithmic so actually that's a great, great spike! Stay tuned for latest space weather updates in my favorite space weather bulletin.

Let's see how this will evolve...

Later on 6 December, another spike occurred. It is also obvious in the above image. The ionosphere is still disturbed these moments I update this post...