so ive been watching the solar flux numbers creep up over the past few weeks and honestly wasnt expecting much since we had a few days of geomagnetic disturbance that kind of killed everything but then yesterday afternoon i fired up on 17 meters and just started hearing stations i hadnt heard in months. worked a couple JA stations without much effort and then an OA4 in Peru called me out of nowhere which was pretty exciting for a weekday afternoon.

im curious if other people are seeing the same thing or if it was just a lucky window i stumbled into. my antenna situation is nothing special, just a fan dipole up about 30 feet so its not like im running a beam or anything. been checking DXmaps and the cluster but sometimes you just gotta get on and listen i guess.

also been trying to understand the K index better — i know lower is generally better for HF but is there a point where even a K of 2 or 3 can still support decent DX or does it really fall off a cliff above 1?

yeah 17 has been surprisingly good this week, worked a few EU stations on Tuesday evening which i wasnt expecting at all given how the week started with that CME messing things up. the flux has been hovering around 150 or so which is solidly good territory, definitely not the peak days we had a couple months back but still plenty to work with.

on your K index question — so basically a K of 2 is totally fine, still get good propagation especially on the lower bands and mid range HF. 3 starts to be noticeable, you might see the higher bands get a little flaky but 20 and below usually hold up okay. once you hit 4 and above thats when it really starts falling apart, especially for high latitude paths. a path from the US to somewhere like VK or ZL is gonna suffer a lot more than a path to South America. the auroral zone kinda acts like a wall when K gets high.

the OA4 contact is awesome by the way, Peru can be tricky from certain parts of the US depending on your location. what time of day was that?

this is actually something i've been trying to learn more about as a relatively new tech who just upgraded to general a few months ago. i downloaded the HamSphere app and also check prop.kc2g.com sometimes but honestly i dont totally understand everything im looking at yet. like i get that higher solar flux = more ionization = better propagation on higher bands but the actual numbers and what counts as good vs bad is still kinda fuzzy to me.

did you use any specific tool to predict that 17m opening or did you just kind of get lucky and tune around? asking because i feel like half the time i get on i just hear nothing and give up too fast probably