Cycle 25 is Kicking Butt

Don't know why I didn't write about this when it happened.

August 9th, the daily Sunspot Number (SSN) was 382. That seemed enormously high. I couldn't remember a single time when the SSN was that high. So, I did some digging.

I downloaded all the SSN data, converted into an Excel spreadsheet and did some analysis. The SSN hasn't been that high since 1991. That's 33 years ago!

The SSN has only been this high a total of ten times in my lifetime (since February 1961) -- Five in 1979, Twice in 1989, and Three times in 1991. 

Of course, none of this compares with Cycle 19, where daily SSN values were well over 500 for many days. But those values all happened 1956-1959, well before I was born.

Cycle 25 is shaping up to be much better than Cycle 24, which was really lousy, and possibly better than Cycle 23.  The smoothed SSN has already exceeded the maximum value for Cycle 24, and it is far from over. 

We've already seen a huge change in the bands in the last couple of years. 20m is open 24 hours, and 15m much of that time. 12 and 10m is open every day. I'm hoping we might see some 6m F2 openings. Enjoy it while you can. We should have two more years of these conditions before the cycle starts back down.

Potentially, yes. Despite over 100 years of study, radio propagation is still wildly unpredictable. That's part of what makes it fun. 

Higher SSN values means more Extreme UV radiation from the sun, which generates the ions in the ionosphere. These ions cause radio energy to bend back toward the Earth. More ions means more bending, so radio propagation happens on higher frequency bands than when the SSN is low. 

All this is driven by the roughly 11 year Sunspot Cycle. In about 5-6 years, the SSN will be back near zero, and radio propagation will improve on the lower frequency bands. The higher bands will likely not open at all.