Seizing on the positives: the wind was accommodating – dropping on the Friday to allow the tower to be raised, and starting to get windy again at 10am on the Sunday.Immediately prior to the start, the HF bands seemed dead on the waterfall and I was wondering whether something was broken! I’d already discovered on the Friday that I had an intermittent on my 80m shunt feed. It was too late to track down, so I switched to the 160m gamma wire, which could only muster a 5:1 VSWR. Nevertheless, as it turned out even at reduced power this seemed quite effective on Tx. All of this rather dented the confidence in the station, but a check of the SFI/A/K told the story, and as I heard some of the other serials I realised everyone was struggling. Conditions did seem to improve throughout the day, with quite a good African showing this year. I was amazed that ZS1C knew my name!

As per usual, west is best for me, but 20m was the money band to VE; I think because of the MUF. Was quite pleased to work 10 watery sounding VE7s in the evening. People will be aware I have VDSL noise up to 20m. It’s to the SE, so morning directions aren’t so good. I can get OK-ish noise cancellation on 20m, with reducing effectiveness on 40m/80m. The 40m rotatable dipole has no F/B, of course, so 40m VEs are compromised. Sadly, 80m was almost a total washout. I just can’t hear weak stuff, although they seem to hear me quite well! Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before City Fibre’s digging up of all the roads round here bears fruit. I’m sure the culprit will be happier too – I caused them a lot of re-trains!

I had always intended to get a decent amount of sleep, because I had things to do on the Sunday. I should have entered the 12 hour section as I only put another 12 Qs in the log on the Sunday. As others have noted, the end was a slog. What would be more likely to get another Q? Run or keep tuning? I did both but the latter seemed more productive. Occasionally, I’d listen to some of the usual suspects to see if they were getting callers. Dead horses and flogging, I thought. I was in fact just tuning away from Dave/BUO at the end and realised he was working someone! I tuned back to hear the “QSY 21?”. I couldn’t even hear his caller! Now I know it was ZD7BG I realise he would have been off the side of the beam at the time. I never did work him (again!), despite now having a lower 15m delta-loop pointed at him and selectable via a stackmatch.

All in all, happier this year with the delta to others. I was in fact quite a bit ahead of Dave by Saturday evening – presumably the fault of his visitors! Will I regret not staying awake? I think I need a lower 80m noise floor to make that worthwhile. On the CW front, I found I was going too fast compared to many, so slowed it down to 24wpm. That’s quite a contrast from when I first started entering this contest some 15 years ago.

My thanks to the intrepid travellers, and to the HQ stations. Graham, I did realise you were acknowledging my 5-band feat, but my paddle sending is not very good!

This is how N1MM scores it, but I’m not sure it’s accurate:

        Band     QSOs     Pts  Cty  Sec  Pt/Q
         3.5      12     335    6    6  27.9
           7      53    1305   34    8  24.6
          14      81    1785   42   10  22.0
          21      34     995   29    5  29.3
          28      10     290    8    2  29.0
       Total     190    4710  119   31  24.8

            Score : 4,710

IC-7610 + 1K-FA

Momobeam TRI-12 @18m

Loaded 40m rotatable dipole @21m

80m shunt fed tower

15m delta loop @11m

Wellgood loop

73 Andy, G4KNO.