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I only decided to operate in this contest on the Saturday morning, and so it was a rather hasty entry. I had planned to go to the shack at about 1300 UTC (the contest started at 1200), after I had finished some work in the University Library. Things started to go wrong while I was still there as a storm blew up (average windspeed exceeding 40 knots at one point) and, soon enough, the lights flashed in the library and the alarms on the uninterruptable power supplies on the computers there started sounding.
When I got to the shack, it was clear that the shack was also affected by the powercut, so I sat and read until 1655 UTC, when the electricity came back on. Conditions were not just bad for WX but also on the radio too. 20m, where I had planned to operate, became very slow as darkness fell to the East. I returned the next morning at around 0900 and, although the winds had abated a little, 20m was not much better until the final hour of the contest, when my rate peaked at the rather dismal total of around 50 QSOs/hour (although I was only S&P). Final score: 39114 points from 100 QSOs, thanks to a high proportion of oblast multipliers. Let's hope I have better luck next weekend for WPX.
Results: After checking, my 100 QSOs had become just 84, leaving me with 23,220 points. I came second out of three English entrants in the SOSB-14 category; in Europe I came 68th of 91 SOSB-14 entrants; globally this was 86th of 128 entrants in the category. The SOSB-14 winner was DJ1CW with 902,000 points; G4EBK was the highest placed English call with 137,256 points. Among all the 20 English participants in all categories, I came 11th, however, so not too bad considering the cirumstances.