Nothing unusual.  Solar flares happen every few years and play around  with the electromagnet field in the atmosphere.  I remember back in my satellite dish period when a solar flare would knock out a bunch of stations for what seemed like a random number of minutes.

What's worse is that this affected all aspects of  communication.  Your own reception might not be involved but there might be problems at the head-end. 

Basically, if it travels through the air, you'll be, in one way or another, affected.
 

Peter the K wrote:

Nothing unusual.  Solar flares happen every few years and play around  with the electromagnet field in the atmosphere.  I remember back in my satellite dish period when a solar flare would knock out a bunch of stations for what seemed like a random number of minutes.

What's worse is that this affected all aspects of  communication.  Your own reception might not be involved but there might be problems at the head-end. 

Basically, if it travels through the air, you'll be, in one way or another, affected. 

You're right, of course, but I think the articles are pointing out this is an especially strong series of flares and that could wreak temporary havoc with radio reception and other systems. 

I remember those infamous C-Band outages, although I don't recall them ever really affecting any of the shows I watched on the Big Dish. The great thing about it in those days was that most of the cable stations replayed their shows endlessly (and still do) so if you temporarily lost the signal, you could just set it to record another time during the week. 

I loved C-Band and really miss those Wild Feeds, especially so I could go to work and torture everyone with my inside knowledge about what was going to happen. (Although to be fair, I never really spoiled anything. for anyone. But boy, was it tempting!)

And one more confession: I used to watch the early feed to stations of Jeopardy! and when it was on in the office, I would shout out the answers - because I'd seen them that morning! They all thought I was really smart, but little did they know the truth! Until now...

RadioActive wrote:

Peter the K wrote:

Nothing unusual.  Solar flares happen every few years and play around  with the electromagnet field in the atmosphere.  I remember back in my satellite dish period when a solar flare would knock out a bunch of stations for what seemed like a random number of minutes.

What's worse is that this affected all aspects of  communication.  Your own reception might not be involved but there might be problems at the head-end. 

Basically, if it travels through the air, you'll be, in one way or another, affected. 

You're right, of course, but I think the articles are pointing out this is an especially strong series of flares and that could wreak temporary havoc with radio reception and other systems. 

I remember those infamous C-Band outages, although I don't recall them ever really affecting any of the shows I watched on the Big Dish. The great thing about it in those days was that most of the cable stations replayed their shows endlessly (and still do) so if you temporarily lost the signal, you could just set it to record another time during the week. 

I loved C-Band and really miss those Wild Feeds, especially so I could go to work and torture everyone with my inside knowledge about what was going to happen. (Although to be fair, I never really spoiled anything. for anyone. But boy, was it tempting!)

And one more confession: I used to watch the early feed to stations of Jeopardy! and when it was on in the office, I would shout out the answers - because I'd seen them that morning! They all thought I was really smart, but little did they know the truth! Until now...

There was a big one in January 1994 that knocked out the Anik E1 and E2 satellites for hours. This impacted cable subscribers across Canada as many Canadian specialty channels were picked up from those satellites. I recall The Weather Network, CBC Newsworld, Family Channel, and others being unavailable for much of the day.