so i've been watching the solar flux numbers climb over the past few weeks and honestly wasn't expecting much since we're still technically building toward the cycle peak but man, 10 meters has just been absolutely going off some afternoons. caught a solid opening into south america yesterday around 1600 local and worked like 6 stations in 20 minutes which is more than i've worked on that band combined since i got licensed two years ago lol

i've been using pskreporter and dxmaps to kind of track where the openings are going but im still not great at predicting when to actually sit down and spin the dial. like is there a rule of thumb for how high the SFI needs to be before 10m gets consistently useful? i've seen it up around 180-190 the last few days and that seems to correlate with good conditions but i honestly don't really know what im looking at half the time with the propagation charts on dxmaps

also noticed 12m has been pretty good too, worked a station in the canary islands last week which was a first for me. anyway just curious if others are seeing the same thing or if i've just been lucky with timing

yeah 10m has been really rewarding lately, good time to be a ham honestly. the rough rule i use is once SFI gets above about 150 or so 10m starts waking up, and once you're pushing 180+ you can pretty much count on a trans-atlantic or transpacific opening happening somewhere during the day depending on your location and time of year. the trick is that the band doesn't care about YOUR schedule so you kind of have to just check it opportunistically.

dxmaps is great but i find the wwv/wwnpn solar data combined with a quick look at the cluster spots is usually enough for me to decide if its worth sitting down. if you see a bunch of 10m spots coming in from europe around 14-17z and you're on the east coast, just get on and call CQ. sometimes it takes a few minutes but the band will surprize you. also dont sleep on 12 and 15m, when 10 is open those bands are usually doing something interesting too. canary islands is a nice get by the way, EA8 counts as africa for most awards which is a good continent to have in the log early on

same boat here, ive only been licensed about 8 months and 10m has kind of become my favorite band just because when it opens up you can work DX with like nothing for power. i'm running 100w into a dipole and worked japan last month on 10m SSB which i still can't quite believe. the audio just sounded so clean too, way better than the 40m pile im used to fighting through

one thing somebody told me was to check the k-index too not just the solar flux, like even if flux is high if there's been a geomagnetic storm the bands can get weird especially on the higher HF. had a day last month where flux looked great on paper but 10m was totally dead and i think that was why. still learning all this stuff honestly