Our path to Asia occurs around sunset, with the high latitude paths opening after dark to areas emerging into daylight. The last paths to close will be along southern routes - such as to Africa, South America and the Pacific. Activity is increasing on 40 Meters, but foreign broadcast activity occupies a lot of bandwidth. Even in the CW band we are finding new sources of QRM from hispanic bootleg stations. These problems exists in many parts of the world, as anybody can buy a radio now.
Signals are excellent from Europe in the evening beginning before our sunset.
The area of darkness over the pole is broadening every day, bringing better opportunities to remote parts of the world. There will soon be many Russian signals on the band, with conditions peaking after their local sunrise. Most of them will be weak, because this is still a difficult path for us on 40. The true lowbands, however, are 80 and 160. Many SSB ops focus more on 80 than on 40 due to the propaganda services, and there is an abundance of DX to be worked on 80 fone.