A few notes on my usual points: propagation motivation stamina running. Propagation in a word “wasn’t” (as in “wasn’t there”). Again. This year there was an additional layer to my standard statement “There is only so much you can do with LP and an 80/40 vertical”: a layer of noise and very strong QSB. I had to constantly ask for repeats. Stations going from 599+ to below my noise level within one transmission. Getting just one digit of the exchange per repeat and then parsing/pasting it together (hopefully right) was the name of the game most of the time. Noise I could deal with better this year; I still do not have an RX antenna but I had installed a phase noise canceller and it seems to be helping quite a bit. But that QSB thing was a killer. The rest of conditions as per usual for the last few years: 10 and 15 pretty much dead (I only had one Q on 15 with ZF2CA who was consistently very loud on all bands other than 10 where I heard no one); 20 m – average just uncharacteristically low signals nobody seemed to be strong; 40 – OK by my standards and the way ZL6HQ/2 was coming through the second morning: wow! if everybody was that loud and clear all frustration (and fun?) would be gone; 80 m – noisy but otherwise OK; just really long stretches of “nothingness” because of my set-up. Hearing my “locals” carry on with good rates of running while I cannot hear a thing reminded me of my place on the totem pole: below the big guns below little pistols below BB guns amongst the “pea shooters”. Motivation I thought I had this time. No distractions and full commitment to go 24 hours. (My N1MM+ shows ~20 hours of operating time.) It was the stamina that I had not. I could make excuses that it is not really “morale boosting” when your Q rate in the last 7 hours of a contest is exactly 1 QSO/hour. But it was the stamina that failed me – utterly. Several times towards the end I found myself falling asleep sometimes for extended periods of time. P