WQ6X Wobbles thru another WEIRD WAE Cw Contest

The middle of August brings us the 1st of THREE Worked All Europe (WAE) radiosport contests. 
As a function of pre-contest research, I harked back to the BLAST-from-the-PAST Blog written last
year about the WAE Contest overall.  ([CLICK HERE] to review it.)  For the August 2024 WAE Cw GiG, I opened the 3830 Score submission to read:

"It was the BEST of Times --- It was the WORST of Times".

The above summarizes the WAE weekend which began with GUSTO and declined on Sunday
into abysmal walls of uncertainty and noise.  For me, one of the downsides of competing in 48-hour radiosport contest GiGs like the WAE is that I often miss the opening 5 - 6 hours.  Currently, my Alameda internet connection seems to be unable to connect over I-P (it used to work just fine). 
Because I often see neurofeedback clients on Friday evenings, the arrival time @W7AYT's QTH
is often around 05:00z (10pm PDT).  

Technically, there are only TWO 40-meter openings during the entire contest period, missing
most of Friday evening is a lost opportunity.  (Unlike Asian-based contests, there are no 40-meter openings to EU after midnight.  Instead for Europe, with the SFI index @300+, it is reasonable to expect a 20-meter opening before-during-after the midnight period.  While the QSO-rate was less than I would have liked, dozens of multipliers made it to the 20-meter log section.

Because sending QTC traffic is nearly 50-percent of the ending score, the decision was made to
NoT initiate QTC message sending until I've had a double dose of Black coffee Saturday morning.  Sometimes European stations can be a bit aggressive in asking "QTC?".  When there were no overt QTC seekers, while running a frequency I would use the F1-Key followed by the F-10 key to send:
                    "CQ  EU  TEST  WQ6X  WQ6X  HV  QTC"
An important operating goal is to "Dump" your QTC traffic before the final 00:00z ending time. 
One year I got stuck with 50+ unsent QTC messages when propagation to Europe suddenly disappeared.  For 2024, I was left with only 5 undelivered QTC messages.

Band conditions on 15 & 20 meters were amazing on Saturday.  Unfortunately, 10-meters was
its currently usual virtual no-show throughout the weekend.  Reading the soapbox comments from
other operators confirm that in the USA (at least in California and the Northwest), 10-meters was
a MASSIVE-DuD!  The one 40-meter opening for WQ6X occurred Saturday evening at 02:55z. 
After nearly 90 minutes only seven 40-meter QSOs actually made it to the log.

Being an EU only contest made it EASY to point the 40-meter Shorty-40 and 20-15-10
STEPP-IR Yagi's to around 38-degrees azimuth and more-or-less leave them in that position. 
(We do something similar when working ASIA-only contests - point the Yagi's to ~300-degs azimuth.)

A number of interesting anomalies presented themselves this weekend:

• Throughout the weekend (and especially on Sunday), the bands would seem to be dead and then out of NOWHERE an S9+ (usually mid-European) signal would PUNCH through.
• As the weekend moved forward and atmospheric conditions quietly worsened, signals (mostly coming over the North pole) began to sound scratchy and raspy.  
• At one point, with some signals I heard what sounded like another station transmitting
  on top of my caller, but in fact was simply a quickly delayed echo of the signal itself.
• EU stations have a tendency to feel that running 35+ words-minute in CW contests
  is CooL.   The truth is that under marginal conditions (like this weekend), dits/dahs get
  clipped from the individual letters of your callsign producing copy-errors.  Has it ever occurred to these BOZOs that one of the reasons their run-rate has dropped is because nobody can copy their callsigns?  Stations with callsigns like S55S, OE2S, SE5E, DM5EE, 9A/EI5LA, II8K, UT2II, II2C, SE4E & IO0A should be sent MUCH MORE SLOWLY.
• DiD you hear me send QRS throughout the contest?  Between the raspy signals,
  polar flutter and noise barrage, callsign copy was often quite difficult.  If you check the RBN Stats for WQ6X, you will see that I ran EXACTLY at 25-WPM the entire weekend. 
  While speeding up to 30-WPM might have added 5 more QSOs to the log, that's NoT enough to make a usable difference w/o increasing the repeat-rate considerably.

After 6+ hours of sleep, I was back in the chair at 14:26z.  15-meters seemed to be already reasonably open to EU.  In fact, only 19 QSOs made it into the log (and 10 of them were QTC messages).  Frustrated, I enjoyed 2 more hours sleep, only to discover that some sort of solar disturbance had occurred during my sleep periods.  

Restarting @17:32z during the remaining 6 1/2 hours produced on 29 QSOs and enabled me dump all of my QTC traffic except the last 5 messages.  15-meters disappeared at 20:00z leaving the last
4 hours to utilize the "crowbar" method to wangle a MASSIVE 11 QSOs in 4 hours - PATHETIC.

When it was ALL over, I was relieved to be able to do something else that DiD NoT involve looking
for stations to work on the radio.  Instead, I tuned the K3FEF to the 6.925 - 6.931 Pirate Radio window and enjoyed some unique stuff hearable ONLY on the East Coast.

DiD YOU work the 2024 WAE CW Dx radiosport contest?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?