so i've been watching pskreporter and DXmaps obsessively for like the past three weeks waiting for 10m to do something interesting and yesterday afternoon it just kind of... exploded. started hearing spanish stations around 2pm local and within maybe 20 minutes i was working italians, a couple germans, even snagged a CT3 out of madeira which was a nice surprise. ran about 40 contacts in an hour before it faded back out.

solar flux index was sitting around 178 yesterday which i guess explains it, its been hovering in the 160s most of this week but something about yesterday just clicked. the K index was nice and low too, like 1 or 2 all day. i know thats not always a guarantee of anything but it sure seems to help.

anyway just wanted to share because ive been kind of frustrated with conditions lately and it was nice to finally get a reminder of why i got into HF in the first place. anyone else catch that opening? curious if it extended further than the northeast US

yeah i caught the tail end of it from ohio, got on around 3pm and worked a few spanish and portuguese stations before it closed up. wasnt as good as what you described but still pretty solid for a tuesday afternoon. ive noticed that when the flux gets above 170 and the geomagnetic field stays quiet like that, 10m can really surprise you. the F2 propagation just goes nuts sometimes.

the CT3 would have been a nice one, thats a decent DX catch. i keep missing the azores and canaries, they show up on the cluster and then by the time i get to the radio its gone. someday

this is really helpful to read actually, im pretty new to HF and i keep hearing people talk about 10 meters being good "when conditions are right" but i never totally understood what that meant in practice. so is the solar flux index like the main thing to watch? where do you check it, is there a good website for that? i have a technician ticket and i can use parts of 10m but im studying for general now partly because of stuff like this