Dave Thompson

so i was just messing around on 10 meters yesterday afternoon and started hearing stations i never hear, like a guy from Brazil came in so strong i thought he was local for a second. checked pskreporter after and there were spots all over the place. checked the solar flux and it was up around 180 something which i guess is decent? im still kinda learning how all this works tbh ive been licensed about 8 months and mostly just hang around 40m because its reliable but maybe i should be paying more attention to the higher bands when the sun cooperates. does anyone have like a good way to track when conditions are gonna be good without spending all day watching websites? or is it just kind of random and you have to get lucky

Been working on optimizing my 2-meter EME setup and decided to run detailed gain measurements comparing a single M2 2M12 (12-element, 2.1 wavelength boom) against a stacked pair with proper phasing harness. The results were surprising. Single antenna: 14.1 dBi gain with clean pattern. Stacked pair: 17.2 dBi gain (exactly 3.1 dB improvement) but required precise 38-inch vertical spacing to avoid pattern distortion. The catch? Stacking two or more identical Yagis can provide a 3 dB gain increase and a significant narrowing of the radiation pattern, but the key is proper spacing and phasing - the antennas must be spaced correctly and fed with a precisely constructed phasing harness to ensure the signals combine in-phase. Improper implementation actually degraded performance below the single antenna baseline.