Wow, time has flown by, since the last time i even fired up any of my ham radio gear, much less listened to 10M (28MHZ) for activity, so I wonder just how much activity their is. The last time I had the Kenwood TS-440 in the office, tuning around, the number of stations calling CQ were far and few between, as the sun went into some sort of weird limbo mode. Before that time, the sun had been extremely active, producing a lot of flares, and CME's (Coronal Mass Ejections) at us, bringing the SFI (Solar FLux Index) up into the mid 140's. The solar flares and CME's, as well as the SFI are what determines just how reflective are atmosphere is to radio signal's, and the more flares we have, the more it becomes ionized, and able to bounce radio signals. It also determines at what frequencies we are able to bounce around the earth. The higher the numbers, the higher the frequencies we can use. The current Solar activities can be found over at Solarham.
The last 6 months, it has been up to 50MHZ at times, in the VHF (Very High Frequency) range, and 99% of the time up to 30MHZ, the top of the HF (High Freq) range. The year before, there had been almost NO activity on the 10M band, so this year has been a nice change. We are almost at the peak of the 11 year solar cycle, which means that the next few years will be great for radio, then it will start dropping off again.
Well, that is all I have for now, but be sure to check out my work Blog, over at Theroniii on blog-spot. Thanks for reading, Theron