I wish they would come back. Sunspots are good. Sunspots help me make high-frequency radio contacts all over the world. Propagation really gets a lot better on the higher bands, I can work a lot more DX with my puny antennas.

Sunspots come in 11 year cycles, and we are at a minimum right now. From the ARRL website:

Quote:

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Sunspot numbers for April 9-15 were 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and 0 with a mean of 0.

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Here's a graph of the sunspot data we have, even long ago folks noticed the spots, of course they didn't know about propagation of radio waves!



I'll be a lot more active, when the sunspots come back. Working Europe with 5 watts was easy, during the last cycle. So, now you know.

-Chuck, Vegetarian fanboy