As expected, things did not go as planned. Currently sitting here on a break since conditions have deteriorated since yesterday and I am not able to keep up the sort of rate I expected. So I will give it an hour (or two) and get back to the radio. This puts me at about 5.5 hours off from the contest, leaving me with 6.5 remaining to use up of my total of 12 hours.

Unfortunately the overnight hours were not kind to me. I as hoping for better on the low bands (40M and 80M) but the antenna and solar conditions did not allow me the luxury of keeping a reasonable rate. There seemed to be a bit of local noise, which kept me on 20M well into the late hours of the night. Oddly enough I was working Europe after the sun went down. Wish I could be working EU on 15 or 20M now, but there does not seem to be an opening.

Based on my projections I will probably come up about 350,000 points short of 1 million. Last night I believe has done me in. I didn’t see a reason to spin through static and noise making very few contacts, so I dropped out at about 0930z (230am) and returned about 13z (600am). I put up one good hour and one crappy hour, only to find myself here, typing about why I won’t achieve my goal.

With daylight brings the return of the high bands (10/15/20M), which are all lower scoring than 40 and 80M, so exchanging out 6 point contacts for 1 and 2 point contacts won’t help my overall position. Still I will be pleased with the effort so far. I am on pace to beat last year’s mark before hitting the 25 hour mark, which is how much time I put in last year.

Still 36 hours in front of the radio is better than 2 days at work. So no further complaints from me. As I said yesterday, numbers can be manipulated to reflect anything you want. In this case, I was probably a bit off in some of my predictions, which will cause a major scoring change. I decided to run low power, unassisted, meaning not using any spotting resources like a DX cluster of the Reverse Beacon Network. All search and pounce for the the rest of the contest.