Topband: ARRL160CW frm EU center

[Dr. Wolf Ostwald]

hi reflectees !
This contest is history by now and it was hard work from the interior of EU.
The first nite cndx were better, but US stns suffered from heavy traffic 
QRM most times. They surely had a better receiving situation on the 
second nite.
Conditions were poor at the best, long QSB phases made stateside signals 
disappear for durations as long as 30 minutes, then the band recovered.
I was not able to find a substrate for that on solarham or NOAA pages. 
It should have been much better. Surely things are hidden which we still 
dont know of.
To me it looked like there was a lot less activity on the east coast 
from potent stations, the sheer mass was less than in years before.
Some stations were heard and then vanished to never show up again. 
Summarizing i can say that all of the 80 qsos i got were hard work. 
Harder than in the years b4 for sure.
To fight the uncertainty of topband prop is part of the fun, and to me 
this contest is more of a propagation and physics experiment than a 
contest, at least from the EU mainland center.
I observed that EU stations on the coast and in the south surely had an 
advantage, they worked stations i could not read at all. But this is a 
long known.
Now we do have another 11 months to get our swords sharpened again to do 
some cutting through the auroral belt.

73 de wolf df2py