Everything all checked out and ready to go 1 week before the SS.  Now for our annual New England mid January ice storm followed by the deep freeze.  Was I even going to be able to get on???  We got lucky and some temps in the low 30's and bright sunshine the next day melted off the ice.  Here we go...  Turn all the gear on and find the 2 meter / 440 FM radio...an old Kenwood TW4000 is DEAD.  The display has no frequency and all the memory lights are lit with the keypad locked up.  Hope there's not much on FM!...BTW  gone are the days in the Springfield MA area of working 100QSO's on FM!  Where'd they all go????  All is going well when I move someone to the microwave bands to find 903 the RX gain is almost non existant along with the output power.  Same on 1296, and all the way to 10 GHz.  Well in my system the only active parts this could be is the 2 meter intermediate transverter or the Kenwood TS850 IF rig.  Brough the transverter to the test bench and it was fine....It turned out to be the TS850.  If I turned it off for a while it came back to life, so something in it is overheating.  For the rest of the contest I kept it off except for when I needed it.  2 Kenwoods down none to go!  All in all I thought band conditions were OK except there's still quite a void of activity in upstate NY.  Missed a few on my FSK441 meteor scatter skeds because of poor meteors, and one guy using his EME antenna by mistake (K0AWU).  I suppose that's payback for me as last year I fell asleep in the middle of my skeds with Bill and messing both 6 and 2 meters up for us both!  Now we're even!  I also thought that participation levels were low and I could definitely see the effects on activity when the NFL playoff games came on as the bands went DEAD.  Note to ARRL....PLEASE go back to scheduling this on the NFL off weekend between the playoffs and superbowl like it was in the 1980's.  The only other equipment issue was sometime Sunday afternoon my intermittant 2304 transverter became intermittant again.  I guess this spring it's time to try to find that one more time.