Another cool #hamradio fact is that, since right now we're near a maximum in the solar cycle, around dusk and dawn you can basically communicate directly with any place on the planet. To communicate with daytime places, you use the 10m band, and to communicate with nighttime places, you use the 40m band. The pink speech bubbles on this map show people who reported hearing my 10m signal in the last hour. If I switched to transmitting on 40m, you'd see a similar set of speech bubbles but going east instead of west.

When the solar cycle is in a trough, only the nighttime signals get through.