On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, neil gardner wrote:
However on a serious note there was a time I recall that IHUG warned about an expected outage (on Satnet) due to particularly bad solar flare activity... They were able to predict this in advance so it MAY not have been completely imaginary.
Those were "Sun Outages" which is when the Sun is directly behind the satellite as viewed from the ground station. They happen around the equinoxes, ie not this week. See: http://www.panamsat.com/global_network/calc_sun_outage.asp or perhaps: http://ww2.intelsat.com/resources/satellites/sun.aspx You would sometimes also get solar flares, but information about current space weather should be fairly easy to find. -- Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.