so i've been obsessively checking pskreporter and DXmaps basically every morning before work this week because the SFI has been climbing and i figured something had to give eventually. yesterday afternoon around 3pm local time i noticed spots starting to pop up on 10m from Europe and just jumped on it without even really thinking about it

ended up working like 14 stations in about 45 minutes, couple of them were Spain and Portugal which i dont usually hear at all from here in the midwest. signal reports were all over the place, some 59 some barely there, but it was definitely a real opening not just random scatter or whatever. the band was doing that thing where it sounds kind of hollow? like signals come and go every few seconds

anyway my question is really about the solar flux index — im still kind of fuzzy on how to actually use it as a predictor. like i know higher is better generally but how high does it need to get before 10 and 12 meters are actually worth checking? i feel like ive seen it at 150+ and still heard nothing and then other times like yesterday it was only around 130 and the band lit up. is there something else i should be looking at alongside it

yeah the SFI alone doesn't tell the whole story, thats something a lot of people dont realize at first. you also want to keep an eye on the planetary K index and the A index because even with a decent flux number, if there's been a geomagnetic storm the bands can be totally dead or really noisy. the K index being 0 or 1 is usually ideal, anything above 3 or 4 and you can pretty much forget about 10m DX from most locations

the other thing is time of day and the path geometry matter a lot. 10 meters tends to do its best stuff in the afternoon and the specific paths that are open depend on where the terminator is and honestly a bit of luck too. i've had the flux at 180 and heard nothing useful and had great openings at 120, it really does vary. DXmaps and pskreporter are your friends, if you see spots appearing on paths that go through your region just get on the radio immediately because these can close fast. sounds like you did exactly the right thing honestly

nice one on the EU contacts, i'm also in the midwest and 10m to Europe is always kind of a treat when it happens. i've been trying to catch openings too but keep missing them because of work stuff

one app i started using is hamclock, it shows the greyline and some propagation stuff all in one place and ive found it helpful just to have running on an old tablet. might be worth looking at if you havent already