so ive been noticing 15m has been doing some strange things this past week or so. some mornings it sounds completely dead and then like an hour later im hearing europe no problem and then it just dies again. been watching the solar flux numbers and they've been bouncing around pretty good, yesterday it was up around 160 which i thought would mean decent conditions but i was still struggling to work anything past maybe 2000 miles or so.

im not super experienced with reading propagation, ive been licensed about 2 years and i mostly just fire up the radio and see what happens. wondering if anyone with more experience has a good feel for what's going on with the bands lately or if theres a good resource for actually understanding the solar flux numbers vs just knowing higher is better. also saw something about a coronal mass ejection last week, not sure if that messed things up or if that was before the good conditions i was seeing. just kinda confused about all of it honestly.

yeah the bands have been a bit of a rollercoaster. that CME you mentioned did cause a geomagnetic disturbance a few days back, K index was up around 4-5 which basically kills the higher bands, especially at higher latitudes. the thing people dont always realize is solar flux being high is only part of the equation — you also need the K index and A index to be low and calm. flux tells you the sun is active enough to ionize the F layer, but if you've got a storm going on that same ionization gets disrupted and you end up with exactly what you were describing, brief openings then dead again.

for resources i really like DXmaps.com for seeing where contacts are actually happening in real time, and space weather dot com gives you all the numbers together. once you start watching those together over a few months it starts to make a lot more intuitive sense. 15m right now when conditions settle is honestly fantastic, we're building toward solar maximum so enjoy it.

same thing happening to me on 10m, had it wide open to south america for like 45 minutes tuesday and worked a bunch of stations then nothing. checked pskreporter and it looked like a huge opening came through and then just shut. i think thats just how 10 and 15 are at this point in the cycle, kind of feast or famine but the feasts are getting better. i set up a little alert on my phone for when the DX clusters show a lot of spots on 15 so i dont miss it sitting open while im at work lol