so i've been watching the solar flux index pretty closely the last few weeks and it's been kind of all over the place, sitting in the low 150s for a while then jumping up near 180 yesterday and wow what a difference. fired up the rig around 2pm local and 10 meters was just absolutely alive, i mean i was hearing stations from brazil, argentina, a couple EU stations which i almost never get from here in the midwest, and even caught what sounded like a JA but lost him before i could confirm.

i use the NOAA space weather site plus that prop prediction tool to kind of guess when things might open up but honestly it still feels like dark magic half the time. is there a better way to know when a band is actually going to be good versus just maybe good? i feel like i spend a lot of time calling CQ into what ends up being a dead band and then the one time i step away from the radio everything opens up lol

also curious if anyone else caught that opening or if it was just a regional thing from my QTH

yeah 10m was really cooking yesterday, i worked maybe a dozen south american stations in like 45 minutes which is pretty unusual for this time of year. the flux being up helps a lot but honestly the best trick ive found is just keeping an eye on the DX cluster and when you start seeing spots on 10m from stations near you geographically, thats your cue to jump on. waiting for the cluster to light up is way more reliable than trying to predict it ahead of time in my experience.

the other thing worth looking at is the K index, if that stays low while the flux is high you get really clean propagation without all the geomagnetic noise. yesterday the K was sitting around 1 or 2 which is about as good as it gets. there's a guy on youtube who does daily propagation forecasts, W7WW i think? or something close to that, i watch it most mornings just to get a rough idea. anyway glad you caught some of that opening, we're definitely climbing up the solar cycle which means more of this

i totally missed it, was stuck at work of course. this always happens to me. i've been trying to figure out a way to get alerts on my phone when bands open up but havent found anything that works great yet. does anyone use one of those apps or is there a discord or something that people post in when they notice a good opening happening?