>Its an interesting thought, and I know from personal experience that
>a set of Kenwood Twins operating at 100Watts about 4 ft from a TRS80
>Model 1 can cause it to crash. I would think its possible for a big solar
>flare to at least affect an old TRS80. unlikely, though.
And I remember an article in one of my old ham magazines about computers in
ham radio, perhaps the radio can make it crash, but a lot of the old
computers can do a lot of damage to nearby radios(in terms of reception,
not physical or electric). Both problems are fixed by shielding one or both
items, tin foil iseasy enough, but that article I mentioned earlier had a
bit of a different approach... This guy built a can of steel food cans
around his TRS-80!!
And just because I'm confused, I'll toss in the following. First, even a
big solar flare is unlikely to do much more than make a mess of orbiting
satellites and make long-distance HF communications nearly impossible(due
to ionization of the upper atmosphere), it is EXTREMELY unlikely, IMO, that
any solar event less than a direct hit from a large CME(coronal mass
ejection, seems to be a lot of them around but they always seem to miss.
small target :-) or a supernova would affect the people of Earth. But I'm
not an expert on such things, so I may be completely wrong.
Second, I haven't been following the thread to closely, but what do solar
flares haveto do with y2k? Oops, OK, looking back to the post I responded
to there's a bit of what I would guess is the start.
OK, here we go again.
First, the Sun is NOT part of a conspiracy to cause blackouts and vaporize
the innards of satellites. It's part of the normal solar cycle, which we
are appraoching the peak of now during 2000. There i an increase of
sunspots, and solar flares I don't know about but they happen all the time
anyways, AFAIK there is no change or they just become more frequent. BTW,
there is also the 27 day or so rotation of the sun which plays a big part
in wether we notice at all or maybe even feel the affects of solar storms.
NASA has several sites that talk about this stuff, I suggest everyone go
read them(I'm going to, as soon as I find it...)
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Received on Wed Jan 06 1999 - 12:10:16 GMT