[ADXA] WPX contest

[Jussi Eloranta]

Hi,

I worked WPX CW 15m single band this weekend. "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...

Jussi (aa6kj)