so ive been noticing for the past couple weeks that 20m feels really inconsistent. like some days ill work a bunch of europeans no problem in the afternoon, then the next day at the same time its just dead. checked pskreporter and its showing almost nothing getting out either. running about 100w into a dipole up about 35 feet which isnt amazing but its worked fine before.

looked up the solar flux index and its been bouncing around between like 140 and 180 which i thought was supposed to be pretty decent for this part of the solar cycle? but then we had that geomagnetic storm a few days ago and i think that might have messed things up. K index was up around 5 or 6 for a while. anyway im just trying to figure out if this is something im doing wrong or if conditions have just been rough and ill ride it out.

also completely unrelated but has anyone had good luck on 17m lately? heard someone mention a JA opening last week and i totally missed it.

yeah the geomagnetic storm definitely would have knocked things around, K index that high basically kills the higher HF bands for a day or two sometimes longer depending on how long it stays elevated. 20m is usually the first to suffer and the last to recover in my experience. the solar flux numbers youre seeing are actually pretty good for working DX, like a year ago we were lucky to see 120, so the underlying conditions are fine its just the short term space weather messing with you.

what i usually do is keep an eye on the Kp forecast on spaceweather.com or just pull up DXmaps and see where the spots are clustered. if youre seeing clusters of spots between NA and EU on the map then the path is open even if it feels dead on the waterfall. sometimes you gotta hunt around a bit more when conditions are recovering, signals are there but theyre fluttery and weak.

17m has actually been really nice when conditions cooperate, JA paths from here open up in the early morning around local sunrise give or take, depends on your location obviously. worth setting an alarm if youre into that sort of thing.

I'm kind of in the same boat honestly, only been licensed about eight months and still trying to wrap my head around all this propagation stuff. like I get the basic idea that the sun affects the ionosphere and that affects how signals bounce but predicting it day to day still feels like voodoo to me half the time lol. one thing that helped me was downloading the HamSphere app just to watch where signals were going in real time, not that I use the software itself but the propagation display is neat to watch.

the 17m thing about JA openings is interesting, I didn't even know that was a regular thing. gonna have to pay more attention.