so i've been kind of casually watching the solar flux numbers for the past few weeks and yesterday i just happened to sit down at the radio around 2pm local and 10 meters was absolutely alive. worked a couple stations in Brazil and one in Spain which honestly i wasn't expecting at all given how the last few weeks have been kind of mediocre. flux was sitting around 180 or so which isn't crazy high but i guess that was enough.

i'm still pretty new to understanding all the propagation stuff, like i get the basics — higher flux means better HF conditions generally — but i never really know when to actually sit down and check a band versus when it's just going to be dead. is there a good time of day to watch or does it just depend on what path you're trying to work? i've been using dxmaps and pskreporter but honestly i'm not always sure what i'm looking at. anyone else catch that opening yesterday or know what's been going on with the sun lately?

yeah 10m has been surprising a lot of people lately, cycle 25 has really been outperforming the predictions which is nice. the flux hitting 180+ is definitely enough to get some solid F2 propagation going on that band, especially in the afternoon when the path to europe and south america tends to open up. honestly the best thing i ever did was just start leaving a radio on 10m in the background while i was doing other stuff around the shack — you start to get a feel for when it comes alive.

for dxmaps specifically, you want to look at the cluster spots for 28 MHz and also check the grey line tool because a lot of those long path openings line up right around sunrise/sunset. pskreporter is great too but its more useful after the fact to see where your signals were actually getting heard. if you havent already, check out the DX world website or even just follow some of the solar weather twitter accounts, they'll often post when there's a big flux jump or a geomagnetic storm coming that'll kill conditions.

I missed it unfortunately, was stuck at work. This is literally the story of my ham life lol. Every time someone reports a good 10m opening I'm either at the office or mowing the lawn or something. I did catch a brief one about two weeks ago where I heard a beacon from Argentina pretty clearly on my dipole which was cool but by the time I got set up to actually call anyone it had faded out. I need to just set up some kind of alert system I guess.