This may be my oddest post ever

But it's still better than last year's.

Last year's post was an awkward one about having forgotten it was this blog's 15th blogiversary, but it was almost a full month late. I posted it on March 15. This one isn't that late, only a little. My 16th anniversary was Saturday the 21st. 

My first post was February 21, 2010, which was a Sunday. Since dates move around, instead of celebrating on February 21, I've just used the last Sunday in February. That would have been yesterday, so I even missed the make believe anniversary. 

So let's do the obligatory thing;

Copyright Adobe Stock, as you can see...

As always, I thank you for stopping by. It's hard to know how many people stop by to read by Blogger's stats, part of that is real differences in people stopping by but my gut feel is that most of the "funny business" isn't real. Check out this plot of traffic for the last 90 days. 

Which is more realistic, the peaks up above 20,000 views per day or the ends mostly under 5000? I'll bet those days with over 10,000 views are some sort of either cyber attacks or something nefarious. At random times, I'll get comments that are obviously spam - not related to the post at all, links to other sites, usually outside the US. Stuff like that. I generally delete those but leave the "deleted" message in hopes that the ones doing it will realize the comment will only be there a few hours. 

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So let me pass on something that I think many people will find interesting, especially hams and broader radio hobbyists. We have just gone through at least 1-1/2 days without one visible sunspot. I first saw this yesterday afternoon, and we don't know when or where the next spot will show up. This is the first time without a visible spot in four years. There's a hole in the sun's atmosphere and we've had minor (G1) geomagnetic storms off and on since yesterday, caused by the solar wind getting here both faster and stronger. 

Both of these things are evidence that cycle 25 is decreasing toward solar minimum. That's not to say we're virtually there, that's likely to be four years away (plus or minus something) just to say that it's almost certain that the "good days" of the cycle are going to be less frequent going forward