so i've been kind of casually watching the solar flux numbers for the past few months and something seems to be clicking lately. yesterday afternoon i just had 10m cranked up on the FT8 waterfall kind of as background noise while i was doing other stuff and suddenly there were signals absolutely everywhere. worked a bunch of stations in South America, a couple in Europe, even heard what sounded like JA calling but couldn't pull him out of the noise.

i know we're supposedly climbing toward the solar maximum but i honestly didn't expect 10m to be this alive. last cycle i barely got on HF before the bands went flat so im kind of new to what a real solar peak looks like in practice. the SFI was up around 180 something when i checked, is that considered high or is it gonna get even better? feels like i should be spending more time at the radio right now instead of just using it as wallpaper

yeah 180 is pretty solid but honestly this cycle has been surprising a lot of people, some forecasters thought we'd peak lower. i've seen the SFI touch over 200 a few times in the last couple months and when that happens 10m turns into a zoo, 15m too. the real magic is when you get a high flux AND low geomagnetic activity at the same time, like K index sitting at 0 or 1. that combo is when the long path stuff gets weird and good.

if you're serious about chasing DX right now i'd watch dxmaps and the DX cluster more than the raw flux number because the cluster will tell you in real time where the openings actually are versus where they theoretically should be. propagation models are useful but they're not the same as someone in Ohio actually working VK on 15m you know. get on when the bands are open, don't wait for perfect conditions because they never last as long as you want

omg same thing happened to me, i was just messing around and suddenly my S meter was going crazy on 10. i'm pretty new to HF so i honestly wasnt sure if something was wrong with my radio at first lol. worked my first ever European station which was a big deal for me. my elmers kept telling me 10m would come back and i kind of didnt believe them but here we are