We may be at the nadir of the sunspot cycle, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of interest out there in solar data. If you’re hot for this kind of thing, I suggest you get the FREE Solar Data Plotting Utility.
As the website notes:
This application was written mainly for Amateur Radio Operators who are interested in the solar cycles and solar data. Tad Cook, K7RA, writes a weekly Propagation Forecast Bulletin that is transmitted by the Americal Radio Relay League on W1AW. This bulletin contains daily sun spot and 10.7mm solar flux values that can be plotted graphically to see trends in the solar cycle. This application can be used to plot the information in a graphic format on your screen.
The program runs on Windows, and there’s even a DOS version of the program. It looks like Linux and Mac users are out of luck as far as the graphing program goes, but the data file is a plain-text file that can be imported into a spreadsheet for analysis. I easily imported the data into the NeoOffice spreadsheet program.
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