CW

"Mr Murphy" showed up with his whole family this weekend. Spent all my off time fixing stuff or try to minimize things that were too bad to fix at the time.

Conditions were down, so things were slower. Really miss 10 meter, but we'll have to get used to it.

Had a pretty good time, overall. Had enough people and plenty of food. 160 meter 8 circle is still 'AOL'.  Frustrating! Beverages worked really well.  The recent work with filtering and switching paid off. Lots of QRN from far off thunder storms Saturday night.  Made things really tough at times on the low bands.  When the storms causing that thunder arrived on Sunday about 1700 UTC, the rain static from hard rains made things difficult on 15 and 20 meters.

Another one in the books. Enjoyed the good propagation on most bands.  Really kept things hopping. Never enough operators.  One night time op had to go home sick, another canceled on Friday, and two could only put in 3 hours each, which made things kinda 'thin' at times.  This was especially true with two first time operators. But, overall, this kind of operator shortage was expected with this family holiday weekend.  Always a tough weekend for ops.

Great to get back into WPX CW again after missing last year due to a wedding and station construction. We had a great crew and everyone seemed to have a good time for this one. Condx weren’t bad. Ten obviously left a lot to be desired, but we’ve gotta get used to that. Fifteen was fair Saturday and much better Sunday. Twenty was better in the late evening/early morning than during the day. 40 produced well considering the considerable shorter opening to Europe. As expected, with flux down, 80 was quite good and noise surprisingly low. Not much to be said for top band.

Wx was a player in this weekend's operating. With the extreme cold, 4 operators could not make it due to wx related issues at home and another two to limit their time here. After receiving a few more inches of snow during the day Saturday, the snow turned to sleet in the evening. The 80 meter delta loop array collected ice and was detuned enough for us to quit using it. 15 meters showed a slight rise in reflected power, but not enough for concern.

Found condx first night to leave a lot to be desired. Stations were not
as strong as I've seen them past contests, and just didn't seem to be as
many at any given time. Just didn't have the seemingly endless pile-up
as in the past.

Trying new stuff out. In the past, I've never had an antenna lower than 120 feet that I could turn and use in domestic contest.  That was really miserable.  Day before the contest, a friend gave me a 5 ele 10 meter yagi that K7SV and I got up the day  of the contest.