This is a good contest. Own country worth as much points as a DX 🙂
Interesting patchy propagation. Most of the stns came in bursts suddenly popped out and disappeared quickly. There was 1 hour when the band was really open. The vast majority of the QSOs were made in this slot.
Could start from 10UT due to family commitments but the real challenge started at Sat evening. A big wx front went through the region bringing severe wind. In according to the predictions, it peaks around 70km/h but in reality, it reached 120km/h. Unfortunately, the bursts took for unusually long, even up to several minutes making the situation pretty dangerous to the antennas. Never seen the short 10m Yagi elements picking up a “U” shape.
The picture does not give back well how strong the wind was.
On Sun morning I tried to keep fixed ant direction into 300 degrees to pick up the EU stns but this proved to be a bad decision. When I reached the wanted bearing the wind arrived perpendicular to the boom and pushed out significantly and started to resonate very badly. I wanted the save the contest but at this point I had to save the ant system to stay atop. I released the mast to relief the boom load then the wind pushed the system to south and kept it there. Most probably the worm gear is broken as I could not move it anymore.
As a last act I utilized the fixed south direction logging FR4KR but no one else heard. After this I could only watch cqcontest.net…
Topping this whole up this windy wx took all day long stopped only on Mon morning.
One more proof that the wind load design is not a “silly hobby”. Even tho the antennas are visibly small areas but extreme forces can build up.
I need to check whether the Yagi’s are still on the tower.