"Say Again?"

If you've been having more comm trouble lately, don't blame the radios or ATC. It's the sun. Again. Another blast of radiation and solar particles is bathing the Earth.

"The storm has already begun, and last night it grew incredibly strong," said Heikki Nevanlinna, research manager at the Finnish Meteorological Institute told Reuters on Friday. Although the latest solar storm began where last month's storms began -- in a huge cluster of sunspots known for their propensity to cause trouble -- Nevanlinna says these storms are considerably weaker than those of last month.

The biggest problems with the current storm appear to be in GPS and cell phone systems.

"(GPS receivers) may give bad coordinates or it may take them an extremely long time to get data. This demonstrates that the intermediary substance in which the signals are traveling is in a very disturbed state," said Nevanlinna.

But if that's the worst of it, we're lucky. During last month's storms, 50,000 Swedes were left in the cold and the dark because the geomagnetic storms knocked their power out.

FMI: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov