so ive been watching the solar flux numbers climb the past few weeks and finally took some time this weekend to sit down and actually work the bands for a few hours. 17m was absolutely wild on saturday afternoon, i was hearing stations from japan and australia like they were nextdoor neighbors. worked a JA7 with just 100w and a wire dipole which honestly i wasnt expecting at all.

been a ham for about 3 years now and i feel like this is the first time ive really experienced what a high solar cycle actually feels like. SFI was up around 180 which i know isnt record breaking but compared to the last couple years its been great. 10m has even been opening up to europe in the mornings which i havent seen much of since i got licensed.

curious what others have been hearing, anyone catching anything interesting? also is there a good resource for predicting when these openings are gonna happen, like beyond just checking the DX cluster and hoping for the best

yeah 10m has been crazy good, i worked something like 30 countries on 10 last month which is more than i managed in the previous two years combined. the JA path has been really consistent in the afternoons here, usually opens around 2pm local and runs for a couple hours give or take.

for predicting openings i use a combination of things honestly. prop.kc2g.com is pretty solid for a quick visual overview, shows you realtime paths that are active based on RBN spots. VOACAP is good if you want to actually plan a schedule with someone specific, you put in your location and theirs and it gives you probability charts by hour. but honestly once you get a feel for the solar numbers and your local sunrise/sunset times a lot of it starts to become intuitive. gray line is still magic for 40 and 80m DX if you havent played with that yet.

the cluster is fine for knowing whats happening right now but yeah it doesnt really help you predict anything. just gotta keep an eye on spaceweather.com and get a sense for what SFI and A/K index numbers mean for the bands you care about.

oh man im jealous, my antenna situation is kind of a mess right now so ive mostly just been listening. did hear a VK on 15m last week which was cool even if i couldnt work him. what kind of wire dipole are you running, just a regular flattop or something fancier?