so i've been noticing for the past few weeks that 10m and 12m have been absolutely wild some days and then completely dead the next. yesterday afternoon i worked 3 stations in japan and one in south africa just running 100w into my dipole, which never happens for me, and then this morning i tried calling CQ for like 20 minutes and heard absolutely nothing. not even noise really.

i've been checking the solar flux index on spaceweather.com and it was up around 210 or so yesterday which i guess is pretty high? i'm still pretty new to understanding all this stuff. is there like a threshold where things really start to open up or is it more complicated than that. also saw something about a geomagnetic storm warning and im not sure if that helps or hurts things

anyway just curious what you more experienced folks pay attention to when deciding which bands to even bother with. any websites or tools you actually use day to day would be appreciated too

geomagnetic storms are generally bad news, especially for the higher latitude paths. the K index is what you want to watch for that - if it's above 4 or 5 you can pretty much forget about reliable DX on the higher HF bands, sometimes even 20m starts getting sketchy. but yeah a solar flux of 210 is quite good, we havent seen numbers like that consistently in a long time so youre kind of getting spoiled right now haha

for tools i mostly just use DXmaps.com to see where spots are coming in from in real time and that gives you a pretty good feel for whats open without having to guess. VOACAP online is worth bookmarking too if you want to actually predict a path before you sit down to operate. takes a bit to learn how to read it but its worth it

the thing to remember is propagation changes hour to hour not just day to day. that south africa opening probably only lasted a couple hours and you just happened to catch it. thats kind of the magic of it honestly, you never really know what youre gonna get

yeah i had the same thing happen last thursday, worked a JA on 10m with like 50 watts and nearly fell out of my chair. band was open for maybe 45 minutes and then gone. i've been chasing DX for about 2 years now and i still dont fully understand why some days just cooperate and others dont even when the numbers look similar on paper

one thing somebody told me at a club meeting was to check the DX clusters and if you start seeing spots from your region into a certain area, just get on and try, dont overthink the theory. that advice has actually worked out pretty well for me