One of my favorite quotes—attributed to several people and often paraphrased—states: “Predictions are tough, especially about the future.” That famous quote certainly applied to the propagation predictions for today.
Yesterday, a major geomagnetic storm wreaked havoc with the bands. The propagation widget I have on my phone described it as a “severe storm.” That’s a description I don’t see very often. This morning, the widget showed some improvement, although it predicted poor daytime propagation on the 40M, 30M, and 20M bands.
Undeterred by these predictions, I headed out to Evansburg State Park (K-1351, KFF-1351) for an early morning activation. I used my current go-to setup, which includes my Penntek TR-35 (5 watts) and my 12-foot whip combined with my homebrew loading coil.
Despite the predicted poor conditions, I started out on 40M. I immediately found band conditions to be anything but poor. In fact, it only took nine minutes to make the requisite 10 contacts. I had equally good results on 30M, 20M and 17M. The 17M band was very active, and I had a mini pile-up of DX stations at one point.
After an hour and 20 minutes, I ended up with 58 contacts. I didn’t have any known park-to-park contacts today, but I had 11 European DX contacts including: France (4), Italy (2), Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, Sweden, Slovak Republic. I ran into a lot of QRM today, so I thank those operators for their perseverance. As an added bonus, my little five-watt signal also made it out to California today.
I’m sure glad I didn’t let the band predictions scare me off this morning!
72, Craig WB3GCK
WB3GCK QRP Amateur Radio 
I wish I could understand how these predictions are made. I often can’t see any correlation between the data and the prediction. Is it the planetary k-index? If k is 5 or above then sure there is a storm in progress. But no, I have seen a “poor” prediction when k is 0 or 1. Maybe it’s the solar flux index or the number of sunspots? No again, no correlation there either. Okay, maybe it’s the solar wind – but again no. As you observed Craig, we can often go out and make bucket loads of contacts despite a “poor” propagation warning. I have been inclined to give as much credence to space weather forecasts as I do to surface weather forecasts – none!
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John: Yep. It seems there are always contacts to be had on bands that are “closed.” 🙂 72, Craig WB3GCK
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