Gary, G0XAN, David, M0HVD and Peter, M0PCR braved another wet and windy day on Chanctonbury Hill for the final backpackers' contest of the season. For a summer series of contests the weather has not been very summery! The contest runs in parallel with an IARU European contest so there were plenty of big stations on the band to work. First contact was PI4GN (Holland) at 556km - a good start.
However, the weather had other ideas and we were plagued by rain static for about an hour making it very difficult to hear any stations and severely limiting our QSO rate. When the rain finally eased off for us it had obviously only moved somewhere else and was still affecting propagation. Deep QSB made for hard going, although persistence paid off and in total we made 10 contacts over 300km. Despite several attempts, and getting very close, we could not quite complete with GM4ZUK/P at 687km, so best DX was our first contact, PI4GN at 556km.