And I remember an article in one of my old ham magazines about computers in ham radio, perhaps the radio can make it crash, but a lot of the old computers can do a lot of damage to nearby radios(in terms of reception, not physical or electric). Both problems are fixed by shielding one or both items, tin foil iseasy enough, but that article I mentioned earlier had a bit of a different approach... This guy built a can of steel food cans around his TRS-80!! And just because I'm confused, I'll toss in the following. First, even a big solar flare is unlikely to do much more than make a mess of orbiting satellites and make long-distance HF communications nearly impossible(due to ionization of the upper atmosphere), it is EXTREMELY unlikely, IMO, that any solar event less than a direct hit from a large CME(coronal mass ejection, seems to be a lot of them around but they always seem to miss. small target :-) or a supernova would affect the people of Earth. But I'm not an expert on such things, so I may be completely wrong. Second, I haven't been following the thread to closely, but what do solar flares haveto do with y2k? Oops, OK, looking back to the post I responded to there's a bit of what I would guess is the start. OK, here we go again. First, the Sun is NOT part of a conspiracy to cause blackouts and vaporize the innards of satellites. It's part of the normal solar cycle, which we are appraoching the peak of now during 2000. There i an increase of sunspots, and solar flares I don't know about but they happen all the time anyways, AFAIK there is no change or they just become more frequent. BTW, there is also the 27 day or so rotation of the sun which plays a big part in wether we notice at all or maybe even feel the affects of solar storms. NASA has several sites that talk about this stuff, I suggest everyone go read them(I'm going to, as soon as I find it...) -------------------------------------------------------------- | http://members.tripod.com/~jrollins/index.html - Computers | | http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Lair/1681/ - Star Trek | | orham(a)qth.net list admin KD7BCY | | ham-mac(a)qth.net Portland, OR | --------------------------------------------------------------