What the sun is doing to the bands today. Worth a look before you set the rig up — and worth ignoring when the band surprises you anyway.
Solar conditions
| Band | Day | Night |
|---|---|---|
| 80m-40m | Fair | Good |
| 30m-20m | Good | Good |
| 17m-15m | Good | Good |
| 12m-10m | Fair | Poor |
VHF
- AuroraBand Closed
- E-skip, EuropeBand Closed
- E-skip, 6mBand Closed
- E-skip, 4mBand Closed
Figures issued 18 Oct 2026 1532 GMT. Data by N0NBH. Band conditions are a forecast, not a promise — the only way to know is to listen.
What the numbers mean
Nobody expects a new licensee to know this, and plenty of old hands only half do. Here is the short version.
- Solar flux — how much the sun is shouting at 10.7 cm. Higher generally means the high bands open up. Below about 70 is a quiet sun; above 150 and 10m starts to behave.
- Sunspots — the older measure of much the same thing, and the one people actually talk about.
- A-index and K-index — how disturbed the Earth’s magnetic field is. These you want low. K of 0–2 is calm; 5 and above is a storm, and the HF bands can go flat while VHF operators suddenly get excited about aurora.
- X-ray — solar flare activity. A and B are nothing to worry about. An M or X class flare can black out HF on the daylight side of the planet within minutes.
- Noise floor — roughly how much racket you can expect to hear before anybody transmits.
The band table is a forecast produced from those figures. Treat it as a weather report: useful for deciding where to start looking, and routinely wrong in both directions. A band that says “Poor” has given plenty of people their best contact of the year.
Figures come from the solar data feed maintained by Paul Herrman, N0NBH, at hamqsl.com, which most club sites in the world rely on. We fetch them on our own server twice an hour rather than sending your browser off to another site.