US Military enlists radio hams to simulate fight with THE SUN Nobody's quite forgotten that a really big solar event can upset kit even as crude as a telegraph, so the US military is recruiting radio hams to help test its contingency plans. The exercise will happen between November 8 and November 10 (US time), when operators will be asked to practice what to do before and after the Sun …
Morse code anyone. Depending on the damage one might need to brush up on Morse code. MC transmissions are the least affected by technical failures since it relies on the simplest transmitter and receiver. It will be slow but it would through. Ironically a Twitter user would adapt best since there is low upper character limit per tweet.
"MC transmissions are the least affected by technical failures since it relies on the simplest transmitter and receiver."
The simplest receiver is an AM "cat's whisker". Morse code really needs a beat oscillator at the RF or IF stage to make it audible - the "hiss" of a raw carrier needs to be quite strong to read without a BFO. The most rugged transmitter would be a spark gap - probably with a "coherer" receiver..
Valve systems would probably be intrinsically more resilient than semiconductors - although both would be susceptible to large mains supply over-voltages.
Morse code would be superior if atmospheric electrical noise or the number of stations affected readability - or if mains power failures constrained operation to low power. An emergency radio system many years had a transmitter that was temperature stabilised by being held in the arm pit. It was very low power and relied on a receiver filtered bandwidth of only a few cycles. The bit rate was corresponding very slow - but it could work over long distances.
"Morse code anyone."
To decode morse, first you need a carrier.
I was working in a large (now defunct) SW comms Tx station in 1989 when a CME hit.
It was mostly transmitting CW weather forecasts on half a dozen bands (7kW each) and 4/8 ISB voice traffic on a half dozen transmitters from 2.5-30MHz (5-15kW PEP depending on the Tx) - all put into various large quads up to a mile across.
The first I knew something was wrong was when a call came from the Rx part of the station 100 miles away just after midday. They'd lost _ALL_ our transmissions simultaneously and assume we'd had a power hit. It was only when I told them that everything was still working fine that they realised they couldn't hear anything from anywhere other than their local MW AM stations and the 100kW SW broadcast transmitter 15 miles away. Most of the LW band had been wiped out too.
Ironically a Twitter user would adapt best since there is low upper character limit per tweet.
It's not all that ironic.1
The (old) Twitter character limit came from Twitter's original concept, as a web-SMS gateway. The SMS character limit came from the amount of free space available in the SS7 MAP packet. The size of the SS7 MAP packet can be traced back to telegraphy standards. (Somewhere I have a document that describes this history in more detail, but a quick search didn't turn it up.)
Basically, Twitter is just a fancy-pants broadcast telegraph service.
1Though it is a bit, depending on your expectations.
If there is a big CME alert, what should we do to protect our equipment ?
Are we going to get to a stage where we need to physically disconnect our computers from the wall, electrical socket and network cable ? Can it get that bad ?
Or is it only a problem for telephone lines ? Somehow I doubt that. If long, copper wires are what is affected, then network cables are in for the ride as well.
Most long distance network cabling nowadays is fibre, which is not affected by a CME. The distances involved in distrubution from the area box to the houses in a lot of areas is short enough that these cables wouldn't generate enough current to be immediately damaging. If you live far out of the way with copper cabling connecting you to the ouside world then probably you WOULD need to disconnect your network cabling.
If a big one hits us directly?
Network cabling not so much, unless you've got several miles worth of copper that's not buried hanging around.
The biggest killer is the electricity grid, which even when well maintained will throw major breakers, and spikes, and... So you'd really want to pull the plugs on anything electrical during the storm.
After the event, most electronics wouldn't work anyway, since the electrical grid will either have been shut down preventively, or simply thrown a couple of wobbles, so you can assume a blackout for at least a day, if not longer. So anything depending on electricity would either be battery- or generator-fed.
The EU grid is relatively resilient and has short runs.
The USA grid is highly susceptable to CME hits because of the length of many of the feeder runs.
It's possible to wire your grid to be CME resistant, but it adds cost because it needs extra conductors and bigger transformers wound "the right way". That's only been regarded as important since the late 1990s and most powercos haven't made changes yet.
With current configuration a bit CME hit would burn out transformers. The larger (highly critical) ones cost upwards of a million dollars a shot, take a couple of years to make and Siemens et al only make a half dozen per year - there are hundreds at risk in the continental USA, fewer elsewhere. (Grids outside the USA are generally more robustly configured).
Please, PLEASE, PLEASE disregard pretty much everything in that article about nuclear reactors and recovery because it's SO off the ball on just about everything that it's painful. For instance: "Due to lack of a permanent repository, these fuel containment ponds are greatly overloaded and tightly packed beyond original design. Typically surrounded by common light industrial buildings, with concrete walls and corrugated steel roofs, the average spent fuel pond contains the accumulated fuel rods from ten or more decommissioned reactor cores." This is simply and demonstrably untrue. The author goes on to spout untruths about the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 4 spent fuel pool and how it supposedly nearly boiled dry and nearly caught fire. It's been LONG confirmed that the pool was never in any danger of boiling (helicopter pilots visually confirmed normal waterlevels), let alone boiling dry and that even if it HAD boiled dry the fuelrods would not have heated past 600 degrees and thus would not have ignited.
The Huffpo article seems to be hardline advertorial where the author has found a nice little earner selling scare stories like revivalist religion. It looks to be on a par with Chris Busby's sales of so-called anti-radiation pills to children in Japan and other quackery.
A CME is a large (for very large values of large) flux of charged particles, mainly protons, moving at high speed. This causes radiation damage to electronics outside the atmosphere, hence potentially killing satellites. When it hits the atmosphere it causes all sorts of mayhem in the ionosphere, hence auroras, and stuffs up its reflectivity for HF radio. The large currents created in the ionosphere induce similar large currents in long-distance cable systems. Those (DC) currents in electrical transmission systems can saturate the magnetic cores in the transformers, reducing their inductance so that the combined overload can kll them if the circuit breakers don't work fast enough. In any case the electrical network shuts down (cf Quebec March 89).
This is what can happen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
And note that even in a pre-electronic, pre-electrical era, it caused damage to telegraph systems. Such a storm would almost certainly severely damage orbital infra-structure - NASA on their pages about this event simply state that it is impractical to shield a satellite from such an event. GPS, Comsats etc. would probably all go west for a period of at least days; potentially years until new satellites were launched. A lot of ground-based repeaters etc. would get fried as well.
Records from polar ice-cores suggest that events like this happen, on average, every 75-100 years (opinions vary; some say 500 years). So, we're probably overdue!
A ham's "huge antenna" is nowhere near large enough to generate substantial voltage from a CME.
The affected telegraph lines were tens of miles long. The average ham setup would be lucky to achieve 500 yards (nor does it need to be that large unless you're doing specialist work with very low launch angles)
waiting for a CME to wipe the smirks off the faces of all you Twatter, Farcebook and smartphone addicts.
I for one will jump with glee when I can see that teenagers (and those adults that act like them) will actually have to talk to the person next to them instead of texting. REAL interpersonal relationships will occur instead of imagined ones.
I for one will jump with glee when I can see that teenagers (and those adults that act like them) will actually have to talk to the person next to them instead of texting. REAL interpersonal relationships will occur instead of imagined ones.
If you're texting with imaginary people, you're doing it wrong.
Of course, if you had an ounce of capacity for critical thinking, you'd understand not only that interpersonal relations are no less real when mediated by communication technology, but also that we've had time- and space-distributed communications since humans first invented durable symbols, which was well before the invention of writing, much less SMS.
Radio Hams can be a bit weird. I like to go to "Hamfests" and there are people that are card-carrying nerds as much as any computer field. (If there really was a card for such things, I would carry it.) And questionable hygiene and odd worldviews abound with some. Some are somewhat indistinguishable from members of a militia group except for the gentleness in their eyes and more technical skills.
These are knowledgeable, good, down-to-Earth people, and and infinitely helpful folks. They are the salt of the Earth and will help you with a flat tire, an antenna problem, or the aftermath of an apocalypse. They are not just a "resource" to the gub'mnt, but people that would help rebuild if things truly went all crazy. If the government ever made any good decisions, this is one of them.
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