so i've been on almost every evening this week and honestly the bands have been kinda rough. lots of static crashes, got some QSB on what should've been a decent path to the midwest, and i dunno it just feels like the ionosphere is having a bad week or something. did manage to work a guy in Minnesota running what sounded like a tube rig, which was kind of cool to hear. that old audio just sounds different you know. anyway not really going anywhere with this just curious if others are noticing the same or if its just my location (pacific northwest)

yeah same here in ohio, 40m has been pretty junky after sunset the last few days. i blamed my feedline at first lol but checked everything and its fine. just noisy. i did catch a decent run of stations around 7.240 last night for maybe 20 minutes then it just fell apart. the tube rig thing is real though, you can always tell, something about the way the signal breathes

I'm still pretty new to HF but I've been listening more than transmitting and yeah the noise on 40 has been a lot. I actually thought something was wrong with my setup for the first couple days. Ended up being just... conditions I guess. Still learning how to read the propagation charts but they dont always match what I'm actually hearing either which is confusing.