Radio · Aether SDR Console
Band Conditions
What the sun is doing to shortwave radio right now. Live solar flux, the geomagnetic index and X-ray flares, turned into a good, fair or poor estimate for each band, day and night.
Live space weather dataA rule-of-thumb estimate, not a propagation model. The only real test is listening.
Fetching the latest data…
Shortwave bands
Geomagnetic index, last 24 hours
Kp 0 to 9 in 3-hour steps. 5 or more is a geomagnetic storm: high bands fade and paths near the poles close.
How the estimate works
- Higher solar flux lifts the highest usable frequency, so 10 to 15 m open up when it is high.
- A high Kp means a disturbed magnetic field: each step above 3 marks the bands down.
- A big flare (M or X class) blacks out the sunlit side of the Earth for minutes to hours, lowest bands first.
- At night the high bands close and the low bands come alive.
Space weather data: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, public data fetched straight from your browser.