[Lowfer] Solar Flare Markers

[John Andrews]

I keep an instance of Spectrum Lab running 24/7 to monitor my 185.302 
kHz, QRSS60 TAG beacon at a distance of 130 miles. That beacon is very 
frequency-stable, due to the use of a commercial proportional oven 
crystal oscillator on 10 MHz. Last Friday evening, March 11, I noticed 
an anomaly in the recorded trace around 2232Z, about 45 minutes after 
local sunset. I later realized that an M4 solar flare had been recorded 
at the same time, and the burst of relativistic electrons had produced a 
radio blackout over the Pacific.

See the screenshot at: http://www.w1tag.com/files/M2_Flare.jpg.

I'm guessing that this was not a ground-wave thing, but the result of a 
high-altitude disturbance of the TAG signal. Given the use of loops at 
both ends of the relatively short path, I get a lot of "skywave" coming 
at high angles.

A less-obvious observation of a C4 flare from about the same UTC time on 
Sunday night shows a similar glitch: http://www.w1tag.com/files/C4_Flare.jpg

The Sun would have been below the horizon in both cases, but may still 
have been illuminating the upper atmosphere here in the NE US.

All of this has nothing to do with CME's or solar wind -- just the burst 
of very fast (almost light-speed) electrons that can result from a 
flare. CME arrivals happen days later here on Earth.

John, W1TAG