From the other end of the spectrum…… we QRPers had a particularly
hard time this year with conditions as they were but enjoyable anyway.
Thanks for Dave, Colin and all the other travellers for the QSOs and
sorry you had such a struggle to get our serial numbers across.

This is what I posted on our local club reflector where I have been
trying (unsuccessfully) to get some interest in these contests:

A fun weekend with the Commonwealth Contest although not without its
problems.

Commonwealth contest is a closed shop so of course it didn’t stop others
doing their own thing. At 12pm on Saturday the 10m South American
contest started which made work on 10m quite tricky. Then at 6pm the
Tesla Memorial contest started on 40m and 80m and the Commonwealth
chasers suddenly found themselves squashed into the bottom 10kHz of
those bands. A geomagnetic disturbance had been forcast for starting
late on Saturday and it arrived with a vengence, 80m signals
particularly sounded very auroral. There was still some action on 20m
but the higher bands were closed for the night so there was little point
in doing the midnight shift.

Here at G3YMC it was hard work with my QRP, calling s9+ VE stations with
no response was frustrating and time wasting and because of the poor
conditions there was a lack of real dx and no peak in VK/ZL propagation.

Sunday things seemed to have improved a bit but 80m conditions seemed
poor and I failed to get a response from VE3EJ. But 40m made up for it
which yielded ZF2CA, ZL/G4BUO. G4SGX/6Y and a couple of VEs. 20m gave me
VK2GR and ZL4TT though some of these were quite a struggle.

In the end I managed 60 QSOs. I see that Rich G4ZFE managed 127 in the
assisted QRP section, well done Rich, what’s the secret? And Mike G4DDL
85 QSOs in the low power section. No doubt I will appear as an also ran
in the QRP results ladder?

Anyway, a fun time on the bands.

73 Dave G3YMC