so i've been poking around 10m for months and mostly getting nothing, maybe some regional stuff on a good day, but yesterday afternoon i worked like 8 stations in Europe and then a couple in South America within maybe 45 minutes and then it just... died. totally flat again. i'm in the midwest for reference.

i've been watching the solar flux numbers on that spaceweather site and it was up around 190 or so which i guess is pretty high? i honestly dont fully understand how to read all the indices. like i know higher SFI is generally better but then theres the K index and A index and i get confused about which one matters more when im actually trying to decide if its worth sitting down at the radio.

is this just what we should expect right now being near the solar max or whatever? and how do people actually predict when these openings are gonna happen, is there like a good resource or tool that isnt super complicated

yeah 10m has been wild lately, you picked a good time to get into HF if you're newer to it. we're sitting pretty close to solar cycle 25 peak right now and honestly the flux has been all over the place — you'll see it jump up then drop back down within a day or two depending on what the sun is doing with active regions rotating into view.

for the indices — the simple version is SFI above 150 and you start getting excited about 10 and 12m, K index you want low, like 2 or under ideally, anything above 4 and the higher bands get noisy and the aurora starts eating your signal on paths through the poles. A index is kind of a lagging average of the K so less useful for real time. i mostly just check DXmaps or the cluster and if i see spots on 10m from somewhere interesting i just go listen, that honestly tells you more than staring at numbers.

those short openings are totally normal btw, especially on F2 propagation — it can be spectacular for a window and then just snap shut. glad you caught it

omg same thing happened to me, i was on 10m trying to work some contest stations and suddenly there were europeans everywhere and i had no idea what was happening lol. i just started calling and worked like 4 new countries in an hour which for me is huge. i had no idea the band could do that, i thought 10m was basically dead most of the time because every time i checked before it was just static.

gonna start checking those sites you mentioned more often i think