“Bad weather” pretty much summarizes the contest for me. Both in the ionosphere and lower. Poor propagation overall and thunder storms circling my QTH. The poor propagation also drove people to other bands (except those of us who had decided to do single band). Whenever the band opened slightly to some direction, for sure there was a thunder storm in that direction and terrible QRN. My ears are still ringing from those lightning crashes – volume had to be turned up and APF on in order to copy stations. I do not want to wear headphones for a while… One could argue that it must be the lightning that fires up the ionosphere 🙂

Finally, late on Sunday afternoon the band opened to EU but then the QRN prevented me from working most of the stations. Nothing more frustrating than hearing a bunch of people calling but I can’t copy them. Then there were some minor episodes like losing the power for a bit during the contest, AC leaking condensed water into my ham shack and me being attacked by a fly swarm while trying to work. The latter was very annoying and distracting! They must have been attracted to my “contest aroma” (sweating with the AC off and no shower). And when the contest was almost over (1.5 hour left), I hear a loud rumble through my headphones and realized that a thunder storm had just developed almost exactly above my QTH. Turned off everything and pulled cables off. I kept waiting for it to go away but no, it decided not to go anywhere (game over). The timing of WPX is really bad for us due to the storm season but what can we do?

But I still managed to get 1252 QSOs and 706 prefixes. However, I am pretty sure that there are tons of copy errors because of the QRN and poor band condx (very weak signals) but that’s life…