Thank goodness for the minor Es opening!

good conditions into eastern Europe

Very very windy but glorious sunshine. Only managed to get on for the last hour but found some old friends and made a new county for me on 6m.

Lots of Es was going to do the 6hr section but propagation so good I went for the 24hr one instead.

good weekend.

Very windy on Saturday Not much Es around We did better than last year our first Need more power linear being built!

I must get a proper antenna!

Interesting conditions, sometimes up, but most times very down!!

Marginal ES, Always a struggle at low elevation and without a beam

Lower activity than last year but some nice DX

good dx at times hard work at others wx fair dx fair

Where is that tin of paint! Slow hard slog from a restricted site

Conditions were reasonable given the present state of the sunspot cycle. Sporadic E contacts came and went rapidly, in fact in some cases so rapidly all the information was not exchanged resulting in lost contacts.

Saturday got off to a quite good start, but didn't get the stateside QSOs others were getting, so lost mults and points. Saturday night and Sunday left a lot to be desired [propagation] - the QSO rate fell through the floor.

Giving away a few points to G/GD than at 04:40 the band opened to LZ/YU/9A/S5 for 49 minutes ONLY! Very narrow opening from here in JO01. First time used CW on 6m

Sunny and windy weather. Some Sporadic E. I think the backpackers contest should have a separate date from the trophy contest.

Some nice ES for most of the contest.

Heavy rain and wind, antenna destroyed Sunday morning.

Arrived on site Friday morning. Rain, later fine rain turning to mist, fog. Felt like being in a cold carwash, yuk. Only G8TIC and G6YIN on site during the day, decided to put up 48ft pipe-mast as only 2 people present. Later more fog, antenna not visible! Decided antenna present and correct due to meteor pings. Went to pub. Friday evening Matt G0XDI arrived with Versatower but couldn't find site due to fog - visibility now 50 yards. We were in the pub - the bar was visible and was unaffected by fog. Saturday morning deployed 80ft Versatower and 6M7JHV long yagi, tower 3/4s way up and winch cable snapped, gravity did its thing and it came crashing down, broke back of antenna. Resigned using only a single radio, single antenna system. All day Friday and Saturday no conditions, just meteor pings, until 30 seconds before start of the contest when video appeared in-band. Then patchy SpE conditions on and off through the contest, some double hop to C4 and EA8, very quiet over night so shutdown and got some sleep. Sunday, bright, sunny, windy - more patchy SpE and some MS type QSOs. Later we found a back scatter/side scatter point more-or-less due south of us which provided a range of contacts from France/Italy/England/Scotland that were weak but workable and which vanished if we beamed directly at them. Matt's computer crashed several times, possibly corrupting the log file. New voice keyer worked well.

Foul wx resulted in our scaling down the station. Continued foul wx then resulted in our 24hr entry being scaled down to 6hr. Given the dire Sporadic E cndx reported in the days leading up to the contest, we are reasonably pleased with the spread of countries/squares worked, though it's still down on the last few years.

Haven't got a proper antenna for 50 MHz so this was very much a restricted entry! Just under a dozen Qs from 1600 - 1700, and four more an hour or two later, all worked on my 7 MHz beam (!)

Terrible gale mast half height, a little DX to compensate for WX. Gale even blew lambs over ,never had flying sheep in contest!!!

Good fun. Just trying kit out before field day

Some DX, hard work at times. Lots of wind!!!

Conditions well down on last year.

Very hard work! Some good propagation and DX Poor activity was a shame. Very enjoyable as usual.

Some good openings around, great to work via iono prop into 9A on Sunday morning. Also some good tropo around. ES seemed very unstable to me, often best results came from beaming about 10-20 degrees off of the direct heading. Heard the US for the first time but bust contact with K4EA, exchanged calls, reports and locators but no chance to get a serial either way. Also heard K4RX at the same time (Sat afternoon). EA4FL/P said not in the contest so no serial number (worked in CW section of band) but logged anyway. Good fun even if it was hard going for most of the time.

Short blasts of SpE with a good smattering of MS. Some stations didn't have the patience to try and complete the QSO via MS