Diana Williams

so ive been on 20m and 17m a lot this past week and something just feels off. like i'll hear a really strong EU station around 1400 UTC and then 20 minutes later the whole band just goes dead. not even noise, just dead. checked the solar flux index this morning and it was sitting around 145 which honestly isnt bad at all, so i dont know what to make of it. K index was elevated a couple days ago, maybe that's still messing things up? i caught a brief opening to JA land yesterday afternoon on 15m which was kind of unexpected, worked a couple stations and then poof, gone. my question is really just whether propagation has been as unpredictable for everyone else or if theres something wrong with my setup that im not seeing. running a dipole at about 35 feet if that matters.

im in basically the same spot as you so take this for what its worth but i started mixing in actual QSO recordings from places like the CW operators site and it helped more than any of the random character drills. hearing real people send real exchanges with real timing somehow clicked different in my brain than the computer generated stuff. plus it made it feel like something i might actually do someday instead of just a weird typing exercise haha