#10m ARRL contest - first day

 Well, in the previous years I did some band condition investigations in the week before this 10m contest. There was no time to do it this year. We had some fantastic propagation on 10m last weeks, but not this weekend. When I switched the radio on this morning I was disappointed, only noise could be heard. After a while I heard FR4QT from Reunion on SSB, but he didn't hear me unfortunately. I guess he's using some power and I only use 100W. I heard a few weak signals on CW but too weak to decode. I decided it would be a waste of time and effort to stay on the radio. So I went outside to do other things and returned after a while and a nice cup of coffee. This time I heard some CW signals and was fortunate enough to make a few QSOs. Later on I even managed to work some on SSB. The strange thing is that some of the signals came up till S9 and then vanished a few seconds later. And of course the same thing as always, I hear far more compared to what I can work with my 100W. The benefit of a low noise environment and a LFA beam I guess. When all signals vanished again I decided to do some other things in the afternoon and return just before sunset. At the evening greyline the propagation lifted a bit. I was able to work V51WH Gunther from Namibia again and a few from Brazil on CW. Best DX was on SSB with LW5HR from Argentina on SSB (+11000km). Not bad for a bad 10m propagation day! I worked 17 stations from 11 DXCC for the first day, hopefully tomorrow will be a bit better, we'll see...