Everything can become worse, even weather conditions in a May contest, we learnt painfully that weekend. The photographs can not really show the real weather in about 1,000 meter a.s.l. But we will learn about the contest results later.

All weather forecasters we watched predicted the same “optimal” contest conditions already days before the event, rain, strong rain, wind, strong wind or storm, some snow or hail, i.e. no real surprise. However, soft hails @ 100km per hour lateral wind are not soft any more, believe us. Temperatures were not less painful, starting at 3°C on Saturday morning falling to -3°C in the night. Yes, the English translation of “Schneekopf” is “snow head”. The beer (stored outdoors) did not taste as usual any more and we needed to change to Whisky and Rum.

The loading was completed on Friday as usual. Our "checklist" helped again indexing all parts needed and showed the responsible OM's. We got a large vehicle which helped a lot to store all the circus like contest equipment.

We arrived at our QTH on Saturday, 9 am, still w/o any snow but already with strong wind. After three ours but just in the middle of the outdoor works it started to rain. However, we were ready on all bands at 14 UTC. One OM stated “everybody can do it if weather conditions are good, but…”

Close to midnight wind bursts exceeded 100kph and water converted to ice.
We were really happy that we improved our equipment a lot during the last years especially regarding antenna masts with 70mm diameter, pegs, and ropes.

Sunday morning started white and cold. There was some sun shine at 11am but not strong enough to rise the temperature a lot. There was no major equipment problem during the entire contest. Also the  HLV-600 MOSFET PA’s we used first time to replace GU74 tube PA’s did an excellent job.

It took us just two hours to remove all the equipment knowing that the next weather front with snow predicted was just in front of us. The final contest team photo was the last action to do and we all enjoyed the journey to our home QTH’s in heated vehicles.

We hope again for good results and we are looking forward to cuagn during the June microwave contest.