so ive been noticing 10 and 12 meters doing some really weird stuff this past couple weeks. had a solid opening into europe last tuesday around 1400 local and worked like 6 or 7 stations in spain and portugal without even trying, just stumbled onto it while scanning around. solar flux has been sitting up around 180-190 which i guess explains some of it but honestly i haven't seen 10m this alive since... i dont know, maybe 2014? maybe earlier than that.

anyway curious what other people are experiencing. im in the midwest so my path to europe is pretty favorable but wondering if the west coast folks are getting into asia or if the southeast is seeing anything into south america. also does anyone have a good resource for checking real time band conditions beyond just the DXmaps site? i check pskreporter sometimes but its hard to get a feel for the whole picture from that alone.

yeah 10m has been absolutely cooking, i worked a BY station last week on just 100 watts and a dipole which i never thought would happen when i first got my ticket. the solar flux index being this high is pretty much the whole story there - we're heading into solar maximum and some of the predictions have it peaking higher than originally thought. cycle 25 has been outperforming the models pretty consistently.

for band condition resources i'd say check out the DX clusters obviously but also there's a site called hamqsl.com that has a decent solar data widget a lot of guys embed on their pages. the WWV broadcasts at 18 minutes past each hour still give you the geomagnetic field info and A and K indices which are worth listening to if you're old school about it. K index staying below 3 is really what you want to see for good DX on the higher bands. when it spikes up after a CME that's usually when things fall apart for a day or two even if the flux number looks good.

omg yes i noticed this too last weekend. i'm pretty new to HF (just got my general in march) and i tuned across 28mhz kind of by accident and there were SO many signals it was almost like 40m on a weekend night. i had no idea what was happening and honestly thought something was wrong with my radio lol. ended up making my first ever contact into italy which was pretty unbelievable for me.

still learning how propagation works and why some days are great and other days the bands sound totally dead. someone at my club mentioned something about sporadic E too - is that different from what you're describing with the solar flux stuff? i get confused about which mechanism is doing what.