@W1YW Chip, take a look at these segments: This is the SSN This is the SFI for the same period In JAN, when the SSN was nearly 150, the SFI was over 175. In JUN, when the SSN was nearly 175, the SFI was below 160. This LOOKS LIKE an anomaly, but of course it may not be. Just saying what I'm seeing on the charts the past few months. I THINK this is why folks are b1tc41ng that propagation is not good. I SUSPECT that this may be because of the numerous flares that have been occurring of late and not allowing the ionization that would be typical of a higher SSN. It takes TIME for the ionization to build up and every time it has started to build lately, an event has occurred that has knocked it back down again.
If you want to do science, then have a control. All the data shows is that the SFI and SSN TRACK, but the slopes are different. It is not a one-to-one , same-slope, tracking of a slowly varying curve or linear progression. But--so what? Is this unusual? What do past cycles tell you as comparison? So what you need to do, to be scientific, is demonstrate that this departure of slopes is 'anomalous', and that can be shown by taking the corresponding rise times of prior cyles and looking at the the slopes of SFI and SSN also. Compare slopes for the SSN to SFI over the cycles. Then compare to this one. Then there can be a discussion about an 'anomoly' in the tracking-slope or not. 73 Chip W1YW
But... I never said I wanted to 'do science'! Never claimed it WAS science. I'm merely pointing out what appears to me to be an anomaly. That's all it is! A simple observation. I never said it was science. I leave science to scientists, not pea brains like me.
You can't assert an anomaly without comparing it to 'normal'. If you don't want to do some simple comparison than your assertion is misleading at best. There is no basis to claim an anomaly. No one said you were a 'pea brain', and a self assertion in that regard just sounds like lack of self confidence. And...what's wrong with doing science? Ham radio 'does science' all the time, no Ph.D. required. You have an interesting point: using a control will tell you if there is something really there.
No one but myself. I know my limitations. I'm quite confident... that I'm a pea brain! I'm OK with that! I've been looking around and not yet found a site that allows data download of the source data to manipulate onto a chart. What I would like to see is all the different data streams on a single chart with a common time base. This would probably allow one to better understand how the many different solar phenomena interact with each other.
Probably not. What it would show is that there is or is not some departure of how SFI tracks SSN in this cycle, compared to past cycles.
I think it would allow a generalized "When this happens, that happens" sort of comparison. What got me looking at this is the website https://prop.kc2g.com/essn/ If one clicks the button at the lower left to switch between eSSN and eSFI, the curves are EXACTLY the same, only the units on the Y axis change. I thought; That can't be right. Must be some bad coding on that web page. That's when I started looking around for more data. I've already emailed Andrew, awaiting a response.
Many DXpedtions do exactly this. Move to a different frequency where it's just them and the pileup. Alternately, what many do is when FT8 gets crowded they switch over to doing FT4 a bit up the band.
from Andrew @KC2G Apparently my mistake for not understanding that the 'estimation' of SSN or SFI is actually IMPLIED from Ionograms. And that the "e" means EFFECTIVE and NOT ESTIMATION and NOT actual numbers. One of the points mentioned time and again in this thread and elsewhere is that the predictions are being bad mouthed, because the ACTUAL propagation is not what it should be, given the numbers. He does go on to say that the propagation prediction models more or less assume that the SFI and SSN are "direct correlates" so my thinking of "mirror image, different scales" is apparently accepted by those that program the models themselves. Lends a bit of credulity to my observation. I'd still like to find the data in say a .csv file that I could graph with spreadsheet. All I've found so far is .json files and I'm not quite sure how to use them. Nor did they seem 'complete' in a quick look.
Andrew suggested I might also wish to share this, which is the slides from a talk Andrew gave to the Western Washington DX Club. https://cleverdomain.org/prop-wwdx/#1
Graph for the first 180 days of 2023. Data is from: https://www.sidc.be/SILSO/datafiles https://www.spaceweather.gc.ca/forecast-prevision/solar-solaire/solarflux/sx-5-flux-en.php
Thank you Sir! I'll check those sites out! It does seem to illustrate my observation that in spite of the spots going up, the flux is not. At least for the time period of the graph. I'll see if I can run back further in time now... don't know how successful I'll be, but gonna try.
It sounds like you'd probably be most interested in http://cleverdomain.org/prop-wwdx/#13 which includes a plot of the eSSN (not actual sunspot number, but actual prop, as measured by ionosondes, expressed in terms of the "ideal" sunspot number that would give that prop) from July 2020 through April 2023. The graph starts right near the recent minimum and continues to the present day, and it shows the sort of upturn over the course of SC25 that you would expect, but the values on the graph (which are 30-day averages) never go over 110, and the single-day averages never go over 140. So I do agree, the prop has been less than what you would "expect" from sunspot numbers in the 150s, 170s, and occasionally 200s. But it's only ever been a loose relationship anyway. Sunspots are, of course, not the thing that drives prop — solar extreme-UV and soft X-ray output is, because UV and X-rays are what actually put the ions in the ionosphere. SFI is also not the thing that drives prop: it's a measure of the Sun's microwave output (10.7cm), which is a million times longer than the wavelengths that contribute to ionization. Both of them are just used because they're convenient to measure, have a long history of measurement, and correlate decently with the things that actually matter over the long run. At the top of a solar cycle there's a lot of sunspots, a lot of microwave, and a lot of prop-enhancing EUV. At the bottom of a solar cycle there's a lot less of all three. But day-to-day, all three things are only weakly correlated. That's why the model on my site doesn't take SFI or SSN as inputs. They aren't actually very good at telling you what's happening today. My model looks at the ionosonde data, which says what frequencies are actually reflecting, and produces eSFI and eSSN as outputs, because those are the numbers hams "want to see".
Thanks Andrew, How do the 'soft' X-rays differ from the X-rays from flares? Longer wavelength? These are generally a 'bad' thing, right? Is this because the "Solar X-rays" penetrate deeper and down into the D layer and cause high absorption, rather than allowing the radio waves to travel up further and get reflected by the F layers?
