so ive been noticing 10m and 12m doing some really strange things this past week or so. like monday evening i worked a JA station on 10m with a dipole and maybe 50 watts, pretty solid copy, and then tuesday the same band was completely dead, couldn't even hear the beacon network. checked my antenna thinking something came loose but everything looked fine.

been watching the solar flux numbers on spaceweather.com and they were sitting around 180-something last week and now its dropped back down to like 145 or so. does that kind of drop actually happen that fast? i guess i always assumed solar flux kind of drifted slowly but maybe not. also there was some geomagnetic activity a few days ago, kp index got up to 5 or 6 which i know isnt great for HF but i thought that mostly messed with 40 and 80 more than 10.

anyway if anyone has been watching conditions lately and has thoughts id appreciate it. im relatively new to actually paying attention to this stuff, been licensed about 3 years but mostly done local stuff until recently getting the itch for DX.

yeah flux can absolutely swing that fast, especially when you've got active regions rotating across the solar disk and then off the limb. 180 to 145 in a week isn't unusual at all during this part of the cycle. the good news is we're still riding pretty high on cycle 25 overall so even when it dips it tends to bounce back.

the kp thing — actually high geomagnetic activity hits the higher bands hard too, maybe even harder in some ways depending on your path. polar paths especially get hammered. if you were working that JA via long path or near-polar short path then a kp of 5+ would explain a lot. you might have better luck on 15m during those disturbed periods since it can sometimes stay open when 10 tanks.

DXMaps.com is worth bookmarking if you havent already, you can see real time spots and kind of get a feel for where the openings actually are versus just guessing from the indices.

i had almost the exact same experience last week, worked a few EU stations on 10 on saturday afternoon and thought wow this is amazing and then sunday nothing. thought my radio broke lol. so at least its not just you