The two operators who usually come and operate the station decided to sit this one out, so at the last minute I had to change all my plans. The shack is 1/2 mile from my house and has no permanent AC power. Rather than run a big diesel generator for the KW amp with just me in the chair, I decided instead to operate on battery power and go the QRP route.  I had to do this once before a few years ago from my house when we had a long power failure right in the middle of the 10M contest. I ran my K3 off a car battery then, and made some contacts! This time I had a solar photovoltaic system installed at the ham shack along with an AC inverter to run all the rotor boxes and computer screens. Wouldn't you know but we were on the trailing edge of a nasty Nor'easter that refused to leave, and my batteries were not fully charged when the contest began. Running 100 watts was out of the question, so the decision was made to try QRP and save the batteries.  I skipped Friday night and went to a Christmas party instead of operating. QRP was a good choice. The K3 primary current hardly changes while TXing when running QRP. Most of the current drain was from the 115 vac inverter running my laptop and a big screen monitor along with the four rotor  control boxes. It snowed Friday night and a little bit Saturday morning. All the clouds meant that the batteries did not charge at all. By Saturday early evening I was down to 72% and I decided to quit. My heart was not in it. My feet were cold, I was hungry, and I could not work a JA no matter how hard I tried. I went home with a not very positive attitude, but then realized that I still had a pretty good score considering that I was just tuning around and calling people.  Sunday would be better!! So why did I oversleep and miss most of the EU opening on Sunday? That was a big mistake.  I got up to the shack and found a clear frequency up in the CW band and tried calling CQ for the first time. Lo and behold I actually was working Europeans at a pretty good clip. This went on for almost 2 hours when I fgured that I should look for mults on SSB. I think that was about 17:30 and my rate on SSB was immediately way down. The band was in the process of tanking. I went home and made some lunch and, when I got back, the Sun was out. The batteries were finally charging and I attacked ten meters with a great positive attitude for the first time.  My little five watts was breaking pileups to South America, and I had no trouble working USA stations at single hop Es distances as well as the far west on F2. I had lots of trouble with the close in states that were on weak backscatter or ionospheric scatter. Iono Scatter does not work with 5 watts.  It was rough hearing all those states but not being able to get through.  On the plus side, I worked a good number of DX stations in the Pacific. Several HI stations, a few ZL and VK stations, plus a few JAs on CW. Hard to believe that 5 watts will carry that far. I guess that is what is magic about ham radio!   I have a lot to learn about running solo in HF contests. I feel that I am missing much of the DX due to lack of knowledge on my part. The solution is to keep trying and, with time comes experience.  My station consisted of a K3 running 5 watts. I used an old version of  Writelog. It did not understand Mexican provinces, so I need to work on that. I also sent CW manually with a paddle. The antenna system is all homebrew with three x 5 element  yagis on a 29 ft boom. They are scaled versions of one of my six meter designs. They are stacked at 70, 50, and 30 ft, and all are rotatable over 360 degrees. One of the rotors was giving me trouble and not indicating properly. I also had a separate South America array of two more of the same 5 element yagis semi rotatable at 40 and 60 ft. They are killer into SA, and I can also turn them to the West for VK and much of the USA. There is also a single 6 element HB yagi (36 ft boom) on a 30 ft tower and an omni directional 1/2 wave vertical above it. I never used these all weekend. They were part of the multiplier station, and I felt that I had most bases covered with the two systems already connected. Running QRP is a lot different than having a big signal everywhere. I found that my best results were had when I brought as much antenna gain to bear in a single preferred direction. The aluminum made my 5 watts sound more like a higher powered station.

Operating QRP was a lot of fun and at times very exciting if maybe a bit frustrating. I should try this again! I'll need to figure out how to keep my feet warm though!