Marconi Memorial Contest 2017

This year's weather broadcast had predicted acceptable weather for Friday and Saturday and continously detoriating weather conditions for Sunday, and this came finally true.
We started erecting the station on Friday in bright sunshine and dismantled the station in a record time of 2 ½ hours in constantly pouring rain and ugly wind gusts (like always) on Sunday evening.
We had a good contest start which was better than 2 years ago but the longer the contest went the lower the QSO rates got and the “Watery Peak (Wasserkuppe)“ lived up to its name when heavy rain clouds arrived during the night.
Thanks to the Slovenian live score we could enjoy a real time head to head race with the DR9A guys in the Black Forest. They somehow managed to get away a few thousand points within the first hour and we finally did not manage to close this gap again. But in contrast to the September competition they could not enlarge their prominence and this time the result is more promising than that of the the IARU September 2017 contest.
Despite the fact that we made 57 more QSOs than the forest gang, their higher average distances per QSO will probably place us behind them for the third time this year. But that is the way it goes.........