08/17/2007 | W0ZQ/R This year our region of the country had been suffering through a drought so I was a bit surprised when the weatherman called for rain on Saturday. I departed Mpls to head south and a bit east to the area near Rochester, MN that we call the St. Charles grid corner. The radar had shown that the rain was on the move, so I thought that I might have an hour or two of light to moderate rain, but instead of that I had a day long deluge and ended up being the unwilling withness to nearly 2" of rain. That made setting up the outside 5.7 and 10 GHz systems a challenge, and rain eventually shorted out my electronic keyer for those bands. I then went to my straight key back-up, but the wooden base that it was mounted on eventually got wet and it too shorted out sending only very long "dahs". What to do. I eventually cut the wires off the keyer, stripped off the wires insulation, and made a good many of my uW CW contacts by touching two wires together. All in all, it was one of my tougher rove's with rain, coolness, and some wind. Here it was August and I had the car heater on. Just to compound things, propagation was very poor making contacts out beyond about 200 km nonexistant. Despite that, I was able to make a very nice 10 GHz QSO from EN33 to K0AWU in EN37. I also was able to clean sweep K2DRH on 222 through 3456 from EN33, 43 and 44. Rovermania (aka, the ARRL UHF contest) continues to be a fun event and I am already looking forward to next year - lets just hope Mother Nature is in a better mood ! Don't forget, send in your logs. -- W0ZQ