so i was just doing some casual scanning on 10m around 2pm local time yesterday and suddenly i started hearing stations from south america coming in super strong, like s7-s8 on a few of them. i havent really used 10m much since i got my ticket because everyone kept telling me it was dead but wow that was something else

i checked pskreporter after and there were spots going everywhere, even some eu stations were making it over here in the midwest. is this normal now? ive been watching the solar flux numbers and they were up around 180 or so this week which i guess is high? i honestly dont fully understand how that all connects to what i was hearing. is there a good way to predict when these openings are going to happen or is it mostly just luck and checking in regularly

yeah 10m has been really coming alive the last year or so, we're climbing toward solar maximum and the flux being up in the 170-180 range makes a huge difference for that band. what you experienced is pretty classic F2 propagation, the ionosphere gets charged up enough to refract those higher frequencies back down over long distances instead of just letting them pass through.

honestly the best thing i ever did was bookmark the NOAA space weather site and just glance at it in the morning. solar flux index above 150 and you should at least poke your head in on 10 and 12m. also dxmaps.com is great for seeing real time propagation, you can watch the spots light up and get a feel for where openings are forming before you even key up. it's not perfect prediction but you get a sense of the rhythm after a while. the south america path from the midwest in the afternoon is one of the more reliable ones when conditions are up, those guys run good stations and you'll often catch brazil and argentina pretty easily.

welcome to the cycle 25 party lol, seriously though this is exciting stuff and you picked a good time to be on hf. i remember back in the low flux years where 10m felt like a parking lot, like you could park a truck on the band and nobody would notice for weeks at a time

dont sleep on 12m either when conditions are up like that. a lot of people ignore it and sometimes it stays open even a bit longer than 10 toward the end of the day. just my experience anyway