so i was just sitting here doing some casual monitoring yesterday afternoon and 10 meters absolutely exploded open around 2pm local time. i was hearing stations from south america, europe, even caught what sounded like a JA station for a few minutes before it faded. logged a few contacts with my old IC-7300 running about 80 watts into a dipole in the attic which honestly i keep expecting to be totally useless but keeps surprising me.

also noticed the solar flux index has been climbing pretty steadily the last couple weeks which i guess explains it. been a while since ive had a run like that on 10, maybe since the last solar cycle peak? hard to remember. anyway if you havent checked 10m lately might be worth tuning around, conditions seem to be trending in a good direction heading into the fall

also slightly off topic but did anyone see the announcement about the new Icom IC-905 being more widely available now? been curious if anyone has actual hands on time with it, the microwave band stuff looks interesting but im not sure i understand the use case well enough yet to justify anything like that price tag

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, came home from work around 3:30 and 28.4 was still pretty lively. worked a couple of Brazilian stations and a guy in Argentina which was cool, both were strong enough that it felt almost like local 2m contacts which is always a little surreal on HF. my setup is nothing fancy either so thats always encouraging when the band does the heavy lifting for you

on the IC-905 thing -- i actually got to play with one at the regional hamfest last month. its impressive hardware for sure but yeah the price is something else. the guy demoing it was doing 10ghz contacts which i never even thought about before. probably not something ill be buying anytime soon but its neat that the technology is becoming more accessible i guess, or at least more consumer-packaged. felt very solidly built, typical Icom quality

wait 10 meters was open?? i had no idea, i was probably messing around on 40 like always haha. im still pretty new to this and i dont really check propagation forecasts the way i probably should. is there a good site or app you guys use to know when to look at the higher bands? i feel like i always miss these things