The Ten Meter Contest is always fun, even when the propagation is not wall to wall. This year was definitely NOT wall to wall, but it still was way too much fun in my opinion. I had managed a few improvements to the station since last year.  Dennis, W1UE, and Art, K1BX, both came to provide the heavy lifting for the contest, and we entered in the Multi/Single category in the Maine section. Friday night was an East of the Mississippi event, with little heard past a line from North Dakota to East Texas. We made about 200 Qs and quit at 0230 UT.

We were up early, Saturday morning, the big European opening managed to hiccup and burp, but that was about it. Only about 15 Qs and signals were weak. It was over in an hour and a half. The rest of Saturday was spent working the states, as many SA and Carib stations couldn't be heard. There was a good opening to the west this day, leading to us getting most of the sections out west. Just as Friday night, the band closed about 0230Z. The highlight on Sunday morning was the LP opening to SE Asia. I have never heard signals as strong on LP as they were that day; the only thing that stopped us from working lots of stations there was there weren't many on. We did manage to work JA, VR, BA, BU, XV, HS, and 9V, and it made it worthwhile to keep one of the antennas in the stack on the LP opening. In total we worked 15 long path QSOs, most on CW.  Somehow KL7RA was worked in the morning. Not sure how that happened?  The Sunday European "opening", if you want to call it that, started earlier and lasted longer (1200-1600Z) than Saturday, but was still not a major opening. For the weekend, we wound up with 88% of our Qs with North American stations; we had just 68 European Qs and 18 European countries with 25 mults between CW and SSB. Most of them were here now and gone quickly type of contacts. 

Sunday evening was a lot of fun with lots of nice Es to the midwest and propagation to the far western USA too. Our rate was quite high, so we did not go looking for JA contacts, but they were in fairly well . I heard a few of them quite well, but no QSOs resulted. Good thing we worked JA on CW and Phone via long path that morning.  I had added two ring rotors to my tower so now all three 5 element 30 ft yagis can be turned independently. Late Sunday we had them spread out to cover Florida and South America, the midwest, and the top one was aimed at JA and Asia. We worked a few VKs, ZLs and AH0 in addition to the USA stations.  All in all it was a great weekend, and nothing broke! We left the rigs and the logging computers on all night, running them on solar power with batteries. We turned off the big 20 KW diesel genset to save on the fuel bill. The weather was fairly mild (for Maine) and the shack stayed nice and warm over night. Akll in all it was a great time and a great effort on the part of W1UE and K1BX. They ended up with 1900 QSOs and over 230 multipliers. Contacts were almost evenly split between CW and SSB.