Sun Noise Burst monitored live while sitting at the PC
See my most recent catch 27-Oct-2015


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.








The French Nançay Decametric array spectrum shows that the event affected frequencies up to 80 MHz


This extract of the NOAA Solar Event List
lists it as event 7010. Details are explained here

: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#
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6970       0032   0101      0141  G15  5   XRA  1-8A      C8.2    2.5E-02       
6970       0059   ////      0201  LEA  C   RSP  027-172   VI/1                  

6980       0320   ////      0339  LEA  C   RSP  039-125   VI/1                  

6990       0602   ////      0612  LEA  C   RSP  034-137   III/1                 

7000       0639   ////      0649  LEA  C   RSP  036-126   III/1                 

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




The French Nançay Decametric array spectrum shows that the event affected frequencies up to 70 MHz


This longer waterfall shows smaller bursts at 11:26 and 11:29, and at 11:52 the big one




  ©  3S design GmbH   Zeiterfassungs-Systeme   Zugangskontrolle-Systeme   BDE-Systeme   Ferienwohnung südliche Nordsee