Neil had come over from Midleton, near Cork, by ferry and we had loaded kit at the farm on Thursday night, so we got a good start on Friday morning for the trip to GW land.
We made our way to our usual site on the upper slopes of Pen Y Gadair Fawr, in the Black Mountains, in two vehicles. Andy's was suffering a radiator leak so many stops were required to replenish coolant, including one for Wilf and Andy at the Skirrid, one of the eight oldest pubs in the U.K., while Neil and Matt got supplies at Tesco in Y Fenni.
The track to the top was a little more difficult after a break of two years, but both made it to the top without incident by about noon on Friday.
We got a couple of tents up, then it rained. We got the blue operating dome up, then it rained. We managed after a couple of attempts to get one aerial fully up and one pole assembled and aerial built, but not up, on Friday night. Then it rained.
Despite the weather, which was not really too bad, we got everything built before the start and had two 7 element antennas ready to go before the contest.
Mike arrived, very damp, after a 6 hour forest hunt for us on Saturday afternoon.
The band was open in bursts to YO, HA, UR and/or EA, CT and/or 9A, S5, I for most of the afternoon and evening. G stations were noticably weak and tropo to PA, ON, DL etc. was poor. This slowed down after midnight but there were still short bursts of E's until 2 am. GM, EI and GI were not worked much at all. We were on about 340 Q's by 2 am local.
Conditions on Sunday were very much the same but there were fewer new stations. The backpackers contest provided some new portable G stations.
Thanks to all the group members who called us, pretty nearly a complete roll call. Well done, chaps. Best DX was 4X4DK at 3782 km.
We finished on about 559 Q's including 14 dupes. Mults were 194. Our claimed score is just ahead of MD6V by about 3½ million points out of 89 million so adjudication could reverse the claimed position.
This VHFCC page has the claimed scores. Here is a Google Earth .kmz file of all our contacts. To the laft is an image of our sparadic E-laye contacts and to the right the tropo/groundwave contacts. If you look at the .kmz file you will see that there are almost no contacts at distances between 650 and 1000 km. Unfortunately this includes almost the whole of Germany.
