Solar gamma ray radiation sun spots affecting DTV reception???

[Robert Grant]

The recent solar flare event should have no noticeable effect on over-the-air digital TV reception.

The effect of solar storms on radio and TV has been less important as technology has changed with the decades.

The stereotype image of all radios and TVs suddenly becoming useless was always an exaggeration. While in the years circa 1925-1970 a good solar flare could affect skywave (ionospheric) propagation, it never did knock out local AM radio, VHF highband or UHF TV reception, and had a minimal effect on lowband VHF TV.

What it could do was harm or eliminate reception of radio signals from well beyond the line-of-sight. Radio and teletype news feeds to/from Europe and the Far East could suddenly go down without warning, and listeners in rural areas who depended on skywave reception of 50kW clears would miss radio for a night or two. If you lived too far from WSM to hear it during the day, a solar storm meant you would miss tonight's Grand Ole Opry.

Oddly, a solar storm could also being opportunities. Class IV stations (now Class C AM) would enjoy the same wide area coverage they had during the day into the night during a solar storm (as the skywave propagation would no longer bend the interfering signals of other stations back to earth).

One night I tried to tune in the Grand Ole Opry for my in-laws (born and raised in KY and TN). To my shock, I got Bogota, Colombia on 650 instead (the aurora scoured the ionosphere in the sky between Detroit and Nashville, but not the skies between Nashville and Bogota).

As for digital TV - the bigger risk to loss of programming would be harm to the satellites that provide feeds to some of the services seen on the subchannels (the Big 4 networks with their fiber optics would be unaffected) I guess aurora during a solar storm may bring interference to fringe reception of a DTV station that actually transmits on a lowband channel (very rare - most stations known as channels 2 to 6 are actually transmitting on highband VHF or UHF) as aurora propagation could bring co-channel interference.