Well had some scary pre-contest problems. First was that the 1hp electric motor powered hydraulic pump that I use to raise and lower the tower did not like the 8 degree temperature that I was trying use it in at all. In normal Summer temps it will stand the tower up in about 1.5 to 2 minutes. On Saturday morning it took the better part of a half hour. And even worse is that the pump seized a couple times in the process, I sure do hope that I didn't do any permanent damage to the pump.

As a rule I didn't try to run the pump at temps lower than 32 degrees in the past, and my concerns for why not to do so were proven to be well founded. But since I have previously destroyed one Yaesu G-800 rotator already, I am now leery of leaving the tower stood up through Winter like I used to do. So it has become a trade off decision between letting the rotator get hammered by gusty winds through Winter, or to try and run the pump in potentially cold WX.

Problem two was that it took extra long to get the rotator to turn, I've had it be a bit cantankerous before in cold temps, but this time it was extra bad. It did finally free up, once it goes, it is good for the rest of the contest. And that was the case again this time.

The good:

The local Madison, WI area activity levels were up some, partly because two rovers came through Dodgeville, WI (EN42/43/52/53) grid corner, and also because there were a number of locals who have been rather scarce previously who did get on this time. And there was even a station doing a “summits on the air" activation from a location by Lake Wisconsin who had both 6 and 2M going. Also the 138kV power line that cuts across the corner of my property was pretty well behaved this time too. Could tell it was there, but it wasn't bad for noise, and PowerSDR's noise blanking did good dealing with it.

This was my 4th major contest since upgrading the IF radios for my transverters to be all PC based SDRs. I now run a mix of some OpenHPSDR DDC/DUC type SDR hardware along with a Flex-5000 for my IFs setup in a SO4R configuration. They all performed marvelously and provided continuous 192kHz visual windows on each of the bands from 50-432MHz simultaneously. That really allowed for some very effective S&P operating in between all of my CQs. So I didn't ever have to make a trade-off decision between doing S&P or CQ'ing. I could just do both all of the time. And cost wise the OpenHPSDR hardware and computers for the IF radio upgrades weren't any more expensive than dedicating a DC-daylight radio for each band would have been.

The not as good:

Conditions, flat, again. One of these days I hope to write about the 'oh wow' conditions on 2M and up. Didn't do as well as I normally do for the longer haul stuff, suspect it was do to a mix of so-so conditions, and lower activity levels elsewhere. No Es on 6M at all that I could find, so all the 6M Qs were of the 'grind them out' variety.

Other:

I didn't quite make it around the compass once an hour with the rotator like I had planned to do, but was fairly close to accomplishing that. I did majority of my 2M CQs away from .200, though I did drop to .200 to stir things up when it got quiet. And I was also able to routinely find and work people on frequencies far away from .200 as well. One was even all the way down on 144.130, and that was the only place I found or even heard them all weekend.

I also have some counters that record every step on the foot switches that I make on 6 & 2M, these counts include all CQs, Q exchanges, and CW transmissions for their respective bands. Having that provides some interesting data to look at for CQs vs. Qs made. The raw TX counts:

6M ~620

2M ~1300

On 2M I estimate about 1000 of those transmissions would have been CQs, the remaining 300 being transmissions related to making the Qs themselves. Unfortunately I don't have a means to count CQs separately. Maybe someday.