so ive been trying to work some DX the past couple weeks and honestly the bands have been all over the place. 17m was absolutely dead for like 3 days straight then yesterday afternoon it just opened up out of nowhere and i was working into europe like it was nothing, S9 signals the whole time. then this morning, nothing again.

i've been watching the solar flux index on a couple different sites and it jumped up to around 180 last week which i thought would mean good conditions but the A and K indices were also elevated so i guess that was a geomagnetic storm messing things up? im still pretty fuzzy on how all that actually interacts. like i get the basic idea that higher SFI generally means better HF conditions but when you throw in the geomagnetic stuff it gets confusing fast.

anyway curious if anyone else has been seeing these random short openings or if its just my location. im in the midwest for reference. also if anyone has a good resource for actually understanding the solar flux vs geomagnetic activity relationship id love to hear it, the stuff i've found online is either way too basic or way too technical

yeah the past few weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster honestly. that SFI spike you mentioned, i saw the same thing, but you nailed it - the Kp index was running 4 or 5 during a lot of that period which basically kills your higher latitude paths. what you probably experienced on 17m was one of those windows right after the storm started settling down, the bands can actually be pretty good for a short period right as conditions recover, especially on paths that go more equatorial.

the way i think about it is SFI tells you the potential for ionization - higher numbers mean more F layer development which is what makes long distance HF work. but the K and A indices tell you how disturbed the geomagnetic field is, and when those are elevated it basically scrambles the F layer, particularly at higher latitudes. so you can have a great SFI and still have terrible conditions if there's a CME or solar wind pressure event going on. DXmaps.com and also the DX cluster will give you a real time sense of where openings actually are if you dont feel like decoding the indices yourself. prop.kc2g.com is also really solid for visualizing actual spotted paths.

same thing here in the mid-atlantic, 17 and 15 have been doing that thing where they open for like an hour then just vanish. i actually worked a ZL station on 15m last Tuesday completely by accident, just happened to be tuning around and there he was, 59 both ways. twenty minutes later the band was gone. its kind of maddening but also thats kind of what makes it fun i guess? you never really know.

im still learning the solar flux stuff myself so cant really help you there but i just wanted to say youre definitely not imagining it