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[KI5AXE]

Fairly new ham here. Does anyone have any suggestions for either free or paid hf propagation software that will run on windows 10? Thank you,
       73 KI5AXE

[K4FMH]

Hi James,

There are several. You might download and play with VOACAP (https://www.voacap.com/) upon which several other free and paid ones are based. Once you get some feel for it, you will have a better sense of what might work best for you.

Although I use VOACAP, I also use PropLab 3.1 (http://www.spacew.com/www/proplab.html) and ACE-HF Pro (http://www.longwaveinc.com/software_solutions/#1529515174138-6143d662-fdd2). They are located near you but have almost left the amateur radio marketplace in terms of presence.

Good luck..

73,

Frank
K4FMH

[KI5AXE]

Thank you Frank, I'll check out your suggestions.

[AA6YQ]

The free-ware DXLab Suite provides both propagation prediction and propagation monitoring. It’s PropView component includes the VOACAP propagation engine, and displays an hour-by-hour graphical view of short-path or long-path propagation between your QTH and a selected location during a specified day:



The thicker the horizontal magenta line, the higher the probability of an opening at that time.

DXKeeper is DXLab’s logging component.

DXLab’s SpotCollector component maintains a database with one entry for each active DX station, as reported by up to 4 DX Clusters or Skimmers (including the Remote Beacon Network), a local VHF/UHF Packet  Cluster, the DX Summit web cluster, and local instances of WSJT-X.

You can select a location for which PropView will be generate and displayed a forecast by
-   Typing in a callsign, callsign fragment, DXCC entity prefix, IOTA tag, or Maidenhead grid square
-   Clicking on a location in a world map
-   Clicking on the entry for a logged QSO in DXKeeper
-   Clicking on the entry for an active DX station in SpotCollector

PropView can monitor the Northern California DX Foundation’s HF Beacon Network, enabling you to select a specific set of beacons to monitor, and then automatically QSYing your transceiver to monitor each beacon in sequence during its time slot:



SpotCollector can be configured to direct PropView to automatically generate shortpath and longpath propagation forecast for each active DX station, and can provide views of its Spot Database filtered by criteria that you specify; for example, here’s a tabular view of all active CW stations on 20m with whom the predicted probability of a short-path opening is greater than 50%:



The red-highlighted column shows the forecast short-path probability for reach station. The green highlighted columns show the locations from which each station has been reported; 4X1MM, for example, has been spotted from Asia and from the east coast of North America. The background color indicates participation in eQSL and LoTW (magenta: eQSL AG only, yellow: LoTW only, light blue: both eQSL AG and LoTW)

Here’s a world map view of SpotCollector’s Spot Database showing 20m FT8 stations being decoded by my local instance of WSJT-X:



Here's this morning's 6m opening to Europe displayed on Google Earth:



SpotCollector maintains live statistics showing the last 60 minutes’ newly reported DX stations by band, and by continent:



It can also provide a more detailed display showing the number of newly reported DX stations by band and by time-of-day:



Note the large number of stations being reported by my instance of WSJT-X on 20m FT8.

For each active station decoded by a local instance of WSJT-X, SpotCollector retains its most recent SNR, lowest SNR , and highest SNR:



The entry for GD3YUM is highlighted in orange because I was competing in the CQ DX Marathon when the above screen shot was taken, and hadn't yet worked "Isle of Man" in FT8.

A quick band-by-band summary of showing active DX stations can be displayed with audio narration.

DXLab’s DXView component can compute and display future grey-line openings between your QTH and any selected location:



If you’re interested in giving DXLab a try, start here.

There’s an online discussion group in which all questions are welcome, no matter how many times they may have already been asked and answered, or how obvious the answers may be in the documentation.

[K0IZ]

HamCap is pretty hard to beat.  It uses VOACAP like most of the prop programs.  Both HamCap and VOACAP are free.  See http://www.dxatlas.com/HamCap/

Super easy to use, little pop-up window.