I found a ridiculous article from my Google News feed about the upcoming massive Solar Maelstrom which could definitely probably affect the entire electrical grid and cause headaches on 14 March.
Or is it 18 March? …the article is confused.
There is a much more reputable site for solar weather – http://spaceweather.com/
Pi day, 14 March is indeed the correct date. I also favor http://solarham.net/ for it’s awesome listing and displays of solar weather data, like this pretty solar wind gif that…shows the solar wind stuff (I don’t know my solar weather jargon…).
So yea, that article was just another clickbait that doesn’t actually know wtf’s going on. Kinda like the deorbiting Chinese space station that has a non-zero chance of landing on your Minivan…
[UPDATE: See? Calm down news media.]
A little farther down the page is some news we hams are too familiar with: a completely naked sun, devoid of a single sunspot.
Could you find any dark cores? Answer: No. The last time the sun was blank more than 50% of the time was in 2009, near the end of the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now the sun is entering a new Solar Minimum, and it is shaping up to be even deeper than before.
-Spaceweather.com
Could this be the worst news for ham radio? Will the bands be forever dead?!
Well, relative to the early 2000s, yea. But to me, absolutely not. I got into ham radio in 2007 when we were at the dead bottom of that solar cycle. I annotated the sunspot number progression chart with my history in amateur radio:
And believe it or not, those years between 2007 and 2010 were some of the best times I had on HF. I was contesting, DXing, building antennas, the whole shebang.
2009 was when I was getting into YouTubing my adventure – smack dab at the bottom of the cycle, and from 2007 to 2011 was some of my peak enjoyment of HF before heading to college. Here’s the playlist to prove it.
So, sure ~some~ of the bands are dead, but it’s not all that bad. There is a ton of fun to be had on ham radio, even on HF.