Never thought that this would happen sometime: DL0GTH was forced to stop contest operation Sunday, 5th of October due to the bad weather conditions. For the very first time in more than 30 years history we are not able to finish a contest regularly. Here is a short report about the incidents.

Weather forecast was not promising as we loaded the vans on Friday: temperatures around 0° and strong winds. We packed all warm and rainproof clothes and hoped for passable conditions.
During the setup on Saturday the weather wasn't that bad. Murphy kept us busy for  the first time: The 13/9cm - transceiver failed as well as the Internet connection via public access point and UMTS. Time to activate the backup solutions and 1400ut we were operational 432MHz - 10GHz. Things went well while our Chief technicians were repairing the defective transceiver. On sunset all failures were fixed and 24/47/76GHz were on the tripods though the temperature was falling and the wind was strengthening. After some minutes of testing it was time to take shelter in the van from the severe cold outside.



Only one QSO on 24GHz was completed this evening.



We were not satisfied with that and hoped for better conditions on Sunday morning. We failed! During the late evening wind was reaching storm level and it was starting to get foggy. Together with temperatures of 0° a very dangerous situation!



On Sunday morning 0600ut the situation became very critical as the 13/9cm mast could not stand the ice and wind load and broke down to the roof of our microwave van! We tried to secure the equipment while the other antennas were bended incredibly by the storm reaching > 85km/h (9bft) --> very dangerous!



After that we decided to stop operation immediately and get the cars and the operators out of the dangerous zone as fast as possible. After five hours of hard work everything was safely down and stored in the vans. Fortunately nobody was hurt and no more equipment was damaged.

Never thought that this would happen sometime: It happened. And we hope it will never happen again.