Ever wished to experience a solar event live in front of your eyes?
I was lucky to catch that moment while sitting at my PC.
On the morning of 31-Oct-2014 I was creating a few screenshots of SDR# to help a fellow DXer.
I just did this screenshot ...
... when around 0822 UTC the noise suddenly increased enormously.
Initially I was really puzzled and suspected a local problem here. But what problem?
Perseus tuned to 39 MHz also unsquelched at the same time.
The noise was wideband and flat, pure white noise with no local spurs. Only then I realized this must come from space and fortunately took a screenshot just within time.
After 1-2 minutes the noise slowly decreased within 2 minutes and went back to normal levels.
So how to proof my assumption?
Fortunately I know French Radioastronomie Amateur Philippe not far away from Geneve (JN36ED) monitoring space on 49.95 MHz 24/7. He sent me his charts from that moment, and indeed these show the noise burst at that time also.
:Product: 20141031events.txt
:Created: 2014 Oct 31 1402 UT
:Date: 2014 10 31
# Prepared by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center
# Please send comments and suggestions to SWPC.Webmaster@noaa.gov
#
# Missing data: ////
# Updated every 5 minutes.
# Edited Events for 2014 Oct 31
#
#Event Begin Max End Obs Q Type Loc/Frq Particulars Reg#
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7010 0821 0825 0829 G15 5 XRA 1-8A C2.3 7.2E-04 2201
7010 0822 //// 0827 SVI C RSP 025-180 III/3 2201
7010 0822 //// 0824 LEA C RSP 025-180 V/2 2201
7010 0823 0826 0843 LEA 3 FLA S05E59 SF 2201
7010 + 0823 0824 0824 SVI G RBR 245 320 2201
7010 0827 //// 0932 LEA C RSP 037-175 VI/1 2201
7020 0830 //// 0927 SVI C RSP 025-171 VI/2 2201
7020 0919 0923 0927 G15 5 XRA 1-8A C2.0 6.9E-04 2201
7020 0920 0922 0930 LEA 3 FLA S05E57 1F 2201
7020 0921 0922 0930 SVI 3 FLA S02E59 SF 2201
7020 0921 //// 0923 LEA C RSP 030-180 V/2 2201
7020 0921 //// 0923 SVI C RSP 025-180 III/2 2201
7020 + 0921 0921 0923 SVI G RBR 245 440 2201
27. October 2015
In the waterfall of my noon recording I found odd noise bars. When playing back these sections I heard a strong white-noise increase. So they were caused by a solar noise bursts, these were also monitored by Philippe (near Geneva). Actually he pointed me to that, because I assumed it to be local noise and hadn't examined it.
Because I had the recordings I could actually listen to it.
And it sounds like this, tuned to 31.555 MHz, (LSB, 8kHz bandwidth).
The weak over-the-horizon-radar sweeper serves as a nice reference. Note how that radar signal gets over-powered by the sun noise, especially the very strong burst at 3:12 in the clip. No, I did not touch the volume setting!
Now I played back the same section with Waterfall-AGC disabled to see the actual levels.
Also the waterfall speed was increased to see more details