so i've been noticing 10m and 12m actually opening up a bit more in the afternoons these past few weeks and i wasnt sure if i was imagining it or if the solar flux has genuinely been climbing. checked DXwatch this morning and there were spots all over the place for europe, which i havent seen reliably in a long time from my QTH in the midwest.

i know we're climbing toward solar max and all that but i honestly wasnt expecting things to pick up this noticeably this fast. worked a couple of EA stations yesterday on 10m with just my dipole running 100w and both were solid 59 contacts which felt almost surreal after years of that band being basically dead. anyone else seeing good openings lately or is my part of the country just getting lucky right now? also curious how people track solar flux day to day — i've been using the NOAA site but wondering if there's something better or more real-time

yeah its definitely not your imagination, solar flux has been hovering up around 150-170 on a lot of days lately which is a big jump from where we were a couple years ago. i've had 10m open to japan from the east coast a few times in the mornings which is just crazy to me. for tracking i mostly use hamqsl.com — they pull the data from all the usual sources and put it in one place, and there's a widget a lot of guys put on their shack computers. spaceweather.com is good too if you want more detail on whats actually happening with sunspots and CMEs and all that. the openings can be pretty short though so when you see spots popping up on the cluster just drop what youre doing and get on because it can close up fast

this is actually really encouraging to hear as someone who just got licensed last year and kind of assumed 10m was always going to be a dead band. I set up my first HF antenna a couple months ago and haven't really had much luck above 20m so maybe I need to just start checking more often and be patient waiting for those openings. Does the flux number give you a pretty reliable sense of whether the higher bands will be open or is it more complicated than that? I feel like every time I think I understand propagation something doesn't behave the way I expected