so ive been noticing 10 and 12 meters doing some interesting things the past few weeks and i wasnt sure if it was just local stuff or if the solar flux has actually been climbing. checked pskreporter this morning and there were spots from europe coming into my area around 1400 UTC which honestly i havent seen in a while. ran a few FT8 contacts with a station in Italy and one in Spain before it faded out.

solar flux index was sitting around 180 something yesterday which i guess is pretty solid for this part of the cycle? im not super experienced reading the solar data stuff, ive kind of just been using dxmaps and watching the cluster but i feel like i should understand whats actually driving this better. does a higher SFI always mean better HF conditions or is it more complicated than that. also noticed 15 meters was open basically all afternoon which was a nice surprise, worked a couple JA stations which was cool for me since im still building up my DXCC totals.

anyway curious if others are seeing the same thing or if i just got lucky with timing

yeah 10 meters has been waking up pretty regularly the last month or so. we're climbing toward solar max so this is kind of what you'd expect, cycle 25 has been outperforming a lot of the predictions which is great news for us HF folks. SFI around 180 is definitely on the higher end, generally speaking anything above 150 and you start seeing 10 and 12 open more reliably but there's other stuff going on too — the K index matters a lot, if there's geomagnetic activity from a CME or whatever it can wipe out the higher bands even when flux is decent. i always keep an eye on both. spaceweather.com is handy or just the noaa space weather site.

the JA opening on 15 is classic for your time of day too, long path can do some funny things depending on where you are. keep watching the cluster and youll start to get a feel for when the bands are going to cooperate. 17 meters has also been surprisingly good for DX lately if you havent tried it much

Italy and Spain on 10m is great, i had a similar thing happen like two weeks ago, worked a handful of EU stations in about 20 minutes then it just kind of died. its wild how fast those openings can close up. im still pretty new to HF so i just watch the DX cluster obsessively and jump on things when i see them lol. havent figured out all the solar flux stuff yet but this thread is actually helpful