Or is the sun getting its hat on?

WSPR = Whisper
Joe Taylor and people like him never cease to amaze me. Without trying to state the obvious he really is a clever bloke. I’ve used WSJT a few times, mostly for receiving but on a couple of occasions I’ve done a small amount of transmitting. I’d seen WSPR on his website and if the truth be told I had too much on my plate to think about using it. Now I’ve got some semblance of normality back and the sporadic E season starts to wane. I was thinking of my long ‘un’established sdr beacon receiver then the idea struck me.
WSPR + Softrock HF Lite + Atom motherboard = WSPR receiver
Why change from Faros. We’ll its no change for the long term but I’ve still not been able to find a way to use the HF lite with Faros for all the IARU HF beacons. Something that it really frustrating. If only I had the ability to write software!
So the possible change in direction needs a bit of thought. Is it worth while? I’m running it for a few days to see what it gives me. Sounds like the project could be something big if enough get involved.
Have there been some sunspots or something?
All of a sudden over the last few days the Faros station has started reporting some signals. After being quiet for a number of weeks with little spotting going on something has happened to spurn it into action, Good news anyway. I might have to get the HF vertical out this evening and put the 6m Yagi to bed until next season.
W1AW reports through the regular bulletins that the sun spot numbers have changed a bit over the last few months to give an extended low. Something that is all too familiar if you try and listen out for DX at the moment.
Below is a graph of the smoothed numbers that are taken from the recent published numbers. I’ve added a polynomial trend line to show what the smoothed smoothed sun spot numbers look like.
The suns having a lazy autumn. or spring depending on you hemisphere. The numbers through on the ARRL propagation bulletin make for a fairly low reading with what is reported to be a a bit of a pattern where a sunspot appears for a few days then is quick to disappear. The chart below shows the decline and makes for interesting reading / viewing. As expected there are a number of theories but as yet I’m not sure what it tells us.