okay so i've been licensed for about 3 years now and honestly 10 meters has been basically dead for most of that time, or at least that's been my experience. i had kind of written it off and just left it parked on 40 and 20 most nights. but yesterday afternoon i spun the dial over to 28.something just out of curiosity and holy cow it was wall to wall signals. worked a handful of stations in South America, a couple in Europe, even caught what sounded like a JA station though i couldn't pull him out of the pile well enough to log him confidently.

so my question is, is this a new thing or have i just been asleep at the wheel? i've been watching the solar flux index on that one website but i never really knew what numbers to look for. like what SFI should i be watching for before bothering to check 10m? and is there a better resource for knowing when to expect these openings or do you just have to stumble into them

welcome to the solar cycle 25 party haha. yeah 10m has been waking up pretty steadily over the last year or so. we're climbing toward solar maximum which some folks are saying might hit sometime in the next year or two depending on who you ask. when the SFI gets up above like 150 or so 10m can get absolutely wild, especially in the late morning and early afternoon your local time for north-south paths. for east-west into europe from north america late afternoon tends to be the magic window in my experience.

for resources i mostly just check DXmaps.com and the solar weather stuff on hamqsl or whatever that widget site is. PSKreporter is also great because you can literally see where signals are landing in real time even if you're just listening, helps you figure out if a band is actually open or if you're chasing ghosts. dont sleep on 12m and 15m either when flux is elevated, those can be fantastic and way less chaotic than 10.

same thing happened to me a few weeks ago, totally stumbled onto an opening on 10 while i was just messing around. ended up working Brazil which was my first ever south american contact so that was pretty cool. i had no idea what i was doing honestly just started calling CQ and someone came back to me. i should probably learn more about the propagation stuff because i feel like im missing openings all the time just from not knowing when to check