Hi Ian,
What I am starting to see is the 20-metre long path from Central Europe to the Eastern VK states opening earlier with VK2 and VK4 SSB stations workable from around 0630 UTC. This is a home station to home station observation but these are solid strong signals so portable to home station (activator to chaser) should also be already possible around this kind of time. The long path on 20 metres used to only open up about 1.5 to 2 hours later than this and then not with as strong signals. So propagation appears to be changing. This weekend however with have a large CME arrived from the Sun and the K Index here is already at 5 (storm level) and will likely stay that high until late tomorrow (Sunday).
Predictions for SC25 are now improving over the previous “same or worse than SC24” predictions from some institutes. Here’s hoping for a good SC25 over the next few years.
73 Ed.
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