Just when you thought it couldn't be worse prop ... a new low.

This was about the worst conditions I have ever seen for a January VHF contest.   While it was very warm the winds were howling at 30 to 50 MHPH all day Saturday and every power line insulator for miles around was buzzing like mad.  The rovers stayed home in droves and I only heard and worked one rover the whole weekend.  Never heard noise that bad during a contest before either.  Turning the tower was difficult and it would stall out often due to the huge wind pressure on the antennas.  Stalling like that causes the DC motor brushes to arc and carbon up, a situation that I would have to deal with on Sunday.  Every QSO was a struggle and I would sometimes CQ for 45 minutes without an answer.

 When I did attempt a band run signals fell off a cliff when we reached 432. 902/3 has become so bad with noise it was all but impossible to hear anyone through the junk.  We had a very light Es opening around 0200-0300Z that I was right on the fringe of and I managed to work a few stations mostly around EL09.  I must have been loud someplace out in the Gulf since my CQs went mostly unanswered and there were very few stations to hunt and peck.   WSJT skeds went OK but calling CQ only produced one extra Q.  When I finally went down for a few hours sleep at 1AM there were less than 100 Qs in the log.   It was also about 50 degrees colder.   

Sunday morning was in the single digits and still 30MPH breezy.  There was pretty much nobody around to work even on random WSJT.  More folks got on as the morning winds calmed down and it warmed up a bit, but by noon my rotor quit working.   Had to take an hour and half off to get the rotor working again but after that the QSOs were finally going in the log.  The nose abated somewhat but I still had to run the blanker all the time.  Conditions finally improved to *normal January* by the evening and everything was going pretty well until 6M opened up again to FL for most of the stations to my east and north.  Once again I was on the fringe of it and getting mostly north FL coastal grids and points east out in the Atlantic Ocean.   I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t break the pileup to N3LL and all the louder he got was maybe S-5. Calls on 2M fell on mostly deaf ears as stations tried to work ES instead.  All in I had to work really hard for the worst score I’ve seen in many years.

73 de Bob