so ive been trying to work some DX on 17m and 15m the past couple weeks and some days its absolutely dead and then out of nowhere ill hear a pile up on a station from like south africa or indonesia and i manage to squeeze in a contact before the band just closes up again. its been really inconsistent and i cant figure out if im doing something wrong or if thats just how its been lately

i checked pskreporter and i can see my signal is getting out ok so its not a hardware thing i think. solar flux has been bouncing around a lot, i saw it was up around 180 something last tuesday and then dropped back down to like 140 a few days later. does that kind of swing normally cause this much variation or am i missing something? been licensed about 2 years so still learning how this all works

yeah thats pretty much just how it goes this time of year honestly. the solar flux swings have been pretty wild since we're climbing toward the cycle peak and the geomagnetic stuff has been throwing curveballs too. when the K index spikes up after a CME hits you can basically write off the higher bands for a day or two depending on how hard it hits. i usually keep spaceweather.com open in another tab when im on during the day

17 and 15 are fantastic when conditions line up but they can go completely silent if the ionosphere decides to have a bad hair day. the trick i found is just to be persistent and check the DX cluster for spots on those bands. if youre seeing spots from stations near you to a particular region thats a good sign the path is open. sounds like you already figured out the basics though, those contacts you got are real, band was open, you worked em. thats the game.

same thing happened to me last weekend, was tuning around 15m and thought it was totally dead then literally 5 minutes later there was a VK station absolutely booming in. got him on the second call which never happens lol. i think the band openings can be really short sometimes, like 20-30 minutes and then its gone. i use the DX heat map on dxmaps.com now and it helps a lot for catching those windows before they close