so i was just kind of spinning the dial on 10m yesterday afternoon, not really expecting much because its been pretty dead up here in the pacific northwest for weeks, and all of a sudden i started hearing stations coming in from europe like they were next door. worked a couple italians and what sounded like a spanish station though i never quite got his callsign sorted out before the opening collapsed.

checked the solar flux index after and it was sitting around 165 which honestly surprised me, i hadnt been paying attention to spaceweather.com the last few days. k-index was pretty quiet too. anyway it got me curious whether anyone else caught that opening or if it was just some kind of localized thing. im running a pretty modest setup, just a dipole at about 25 feet so if i was hearing europe that well the band must have really been cooking.

do you guys follow the flux numbers daily or do you just kind of check when you feel like operating? ive been trying to figure out what a reliable threshold is for 10m to actually be worth monitoring. seems like anything above 150 its at least worth a listen?

yeah 10m has been doing some interesting things lately, we're climbing toward solar max so these openings are gonna get more frequent and more reliable. 150 SFI is a decent rule of thumb for 10m to get interesting but honestly ive worked europe on 10m with flux in the 120s when the conditions just lined up right. the k-index being low matters almost as much as the flux number, geomagnetic noise can kill an otherwise good opening fast.

i use the DX cluster religiously now, if you see a bunch of spots suddenly lighting up on 28mhz you just jump on it, by the time you're calculating flux numbers the opening might already be fading. also the greyline can do weird things on 10m, worth paying attention to when sunrise/sunset is hitting the path between you and wherever you're trying to work. sounds like you had a legit opening though, 165 with quiet geo conditions thats pretty solid. dipole at 25 feet will def work europe on 10m in those conditions, not even a question.

oh man i totally missed it then, i was out running errands all afternoon. this is why i need to set up some kind of alert or something. do you use any apps for that? someone in my club mentioned pskreporter but i havent really figured out how it works yet. im still pretty new to HF in general and all the propagation stuff kind of goes over my head but i want to learn it