Radio Signals

The strongest solar flare in five years erupted on the face of the sun Monday, disrupting communications on Earth. It was expected to set off a brilliant show of northern lights early Wednesday. The flare affected Coast Guard navigation systems and shortwave radio signals and was expected to affect surface and satellite communications through Wednesday, said Joe Kunches of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Services Center. The flare, detected at 6:05 a.m.

The U.S. Forest Service is exploring a plan to ban commercial broadcasting from transmitters on Santiago Peak in the Cleveland National Forest, a move that could force San Clemente-based KWAVE to tear down its newly installed radio antenna. Forestry officials say that the powerful commercial broadcasts could interfere with the peak's weaker two-way radio transmitters, which are used by most of the county's police, fire and emergency departments.

The U.S. government made its first foray into television broadcasting Tuesday, beaming signals to Cuba that the Cuban government promptly jammed. Cuban officials warned of "incalculable consequences" should the U.S. broadcasts continue. "The initiation of tests today by the United States of a television channel in the Spanish language designed against Cuba can have incalculable consequences for almost non-existent bilateral relations," the official Cuban news agency Prensa Latina said.

The obituaries for movie actress Hedy Lamarr, who died at her home in Florida on Jan. 19 at age 86, all mentioned the fact that she co-invented an important technology for radio communications called "frequency hopping." But none of the obituaries described the significance of her invention for current and emerging technologies, or the fact that her intellectual breakthrough will fuel the next great boom in Internet use.

The Pentagon, providing new details that appeared to compound the mystery of the downing of an Iran Air jetliner by an American warship in the Persian Gulf on Sunday, asserted Tuesday that the plane was emitting contradictory radio signals, some identifying it as a civilian aircraft and some identifying it as military. This revelation raised a host of new questions because Navy officials had said that the radio signals picked up by the U.S.

In the steep, rocky canyons where the strongest radio waves cannot travel, residents have counted on their cable television company to bring them FM broadcasts. But the sound of FM radio fell silent Monday for 2,000 customers when Dimension Cable Co. converted the cables to give residents more television stations. That change has caused some residents to raise a noise of their own.

A divisive debate is raging in the radio industry over a new type of high-tech broadcasting system that will provide compact-disc quality sound and allow nationwide channels for the first time. Nearly everyone agrees that digital audio broadcasting (DAB), as the new technology is known, is so superior to existing AM and FM transmission that it will certainly be implemented, though probably not until late in the decade.

Residents of Silver Lake and Echo Park say they are being bombarded by rap music that mysteriously booms from their telephones, televisions, stereo players, bedroom walls and bathroom toilets. The music is being beamed 24 hours a day from a Los Angeles radio station's six tall towers atop a hill between the two neighborhoods. The signal is so strong that some neighbors don't need a radio to hear it. "It's awful. It's unbelievable.

When Barbara Stutheit sits down to play her electric organ, its speakers blare the soft rock tunes of Fleetwood Mac, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston. Stutheit, an artist, is not being visited by a soft rock muse. The nonstop pop she hears through the amplifier of her double-keyboard instrument is courtesy of KWIZ radio. Like many in East Orange, Stutheit has a gripe with KWIZ, located on the radio dial at 96.7 FM in English and 1480 AM in Spanish.

Think of the Low Power FM radio controversy--potentially the medium's biggest revolution since the arrival of FM itself in the 1960s--as a packed dance floor. The way opponents describe it: The room would be so crowded you could barely hear the words of your partner or the sound of the music, or move to the beat without getting entangled in someone else's feet.