I remember “skip”!

No, no, it’s not supposed to be a capital S, and therefore it’s not someone from my past (even though I had a friend in high school with that name), but it refers to radio waves bouncing off the atmosphere. But why am I bringing this strange phenomenon up, and why now? Good question!

When reading an article on Spaceweather.com, The Solar Eclipse Shifted Time Signals in the USA, it stated that the NIST’s (The US National Institute of Standards and Technology) radio station, WWV, broadcasts time and frequency info to listeners worldwide (this occurs 24/7), and how on April 8. 2024, the frequency shifted. Say what?

“It was the solar eclipse,” says ham radio operator Kristina Collins (W8EDU) of Cleveland, Ohio, who assembled records from 13 monitoring stations in and around the path of totality.

So, I continued reading, trying to make sense of the article. But instead, I got to the paragraph below and was totally perplexed. Why would the shadow create a HOLE?

The Doppler shift occurs when the shadow of the Moon pierced the ionosphere, creating a temporary hole where ionization was reduced. This, in turn, altered the “skip distance” from transmitters to receivers.

I read it a few more times and thought, maybe I should contact my good friend, Dr. Dan Durda, a principal scientist in the Department of Space Studies. Who better to turn to than an astrophysicist, right? But before I did that, I needed to do my own research, and began typing a few words into the search engine. Voila, that’s when it all clicked.

SKIP or DX (a term I remember from early grade school), is a name used to describe atmospheric conditions that allow for radio transmissions to travel long distances. These conditions can bounce signals from state to state or even from country to country. My dad and I would use his home-based CB radio to talk with his friends, something we always enjoyed. However, there were “special” nights, when out of nowhere we could hear (and often talk to) people in other parts of the world, including RUSSIA! Hey, dad, this is so cool. That’s when he explained how the signals were “skipping”, but it only occurred at night, and when the atmosphere was just “right”. Ah, so that’s why the solar eclipse produced skip.

While searching through YouTube, found a very personable guy explaining the skip phenomenon. It might help those who are left, curious!