so i've been on 10m more than usual the past couple weeks because honestly i just got curious after someone on a net mentioned the solar flux was creeping up again. pulled up the DXmaps site and just sat there watching the spots roll in. europe was coming in like they were next door, i was hearing italy, spain, a couple eastern european stations i couldn't even log fast enough.

i'm running a pretty modest setup, just a vertical in the backyard and maybe 100w, nothing special. but man when the band opens up like that it almost doesn't matter. logged 6 new countries in like 2 hours last saturday morning which for me is a big deal since i've only been licensed about 14 months.

my question i guess is -- is this typical for where we are in the solar cycle or is this some kind of unusual stretch? i've seen the SFI numbers bouncing around 180-200ish and the K index has been low which i know is good but i dont really have a feel for how long a run like this usually lasts. do experienced ops kind of watch the numbers daily and just jump on when conditions look right, or is there more to it than that?

yeah 10m has been genuinely good, probably the best stretch i've seen in a few years. we're climbing pretty well into solar cycle 25 and honestly it's exceeded a lot of the predictions they made a couple years ago. when SFI is above 150 and geomagnetic activity stays quiet, 10m and even 6m can do some crazy things.

to answer your question -- yeah i do check the numbers pretty much every day, not obsessively but i'll glance at spaceweather.com or the NOAA forecast before i sit down for a session. K-index under 2 is where you really want it for DX work, anything above 4 and the higher bands tend to go to mush, especially on polar paths. the flux number tells you about ionospheric ionization in general but K-index is what tells you if a geomagnetic storm is messing things up.

enjoy it while it's cooking. we should have another year or two of good conditions before things start tapering off. get on 15m too if you haven't -- sometimes 15 stays open even later in the evening when 10 has faded.

dude same experience here. i was half asleep saturday morning and turned the radio on kind of by accident and ended up staying on for 3 hours because i kept hearing new prefixes. worked a JA station with like 50 watts which i still dont fully believe happened lol. my antenna is a dipole in the attic so that makes it even weirder.

i dont really understand all the solar flux stuff yet tbh but i downloaded the DX toolkit app and it shows like a little propagation forecast which has been pretty accurate for me so far. probably oversimplified but its a start