WQ6X Wanders WEIRDLY thru a Wonky WAE WeeKend

wOw!  It don't get ANY Weirder than the WAE Ssb weekend.  It was the Weirdest of times.
In recent days, I have been troubleshooting ethernet settings between aWindoze-7 laptop
and RRC-1258 box.  On Friday, with some IT-mentoring, what seemed hopeless was in fact
nothing more than an errant sub-net address behind the RRC-1258 internet interface box.

Client commitments kept me in Alameda early Friday evening, missing out on the first of the
openings to EU on 40-meters, the Saturday evening EU opening was also missed due to running
the NA RTTY SPRINT.  Triple Space-WX disruptions over the weekend made for signals full of "buckshot" and weird signal fading.

While 20-meters was "kinda-open" on around midnight, only a handful of QSOs actually made it
to the log.  Starting up at 14:00z, 20-meters was still marginal, altho 15-meters was "wide open",
at least until another Space-WX storm hit to essentially render propagation worthless.  Unfortunately, after 3-hours Saturday morning, only 10 QSOs made it to the log - the rest of the day was a BUST.

Shortly before the 00:00z SPRINT RTTY contest, a necessary gender-changing connector could not be found in the RTTY equipment bag - OOPS.  The decision was made to run the FT-2000 (with its TI-5000 interface) locally, except the Xmit audio path was not producing any audio tones.  

Quick thinking produced from the Bag-de-JUNK a pair of 1/8" stereo patch cables enabling
cross connecting the laptop with the microphone plug.  Being a direct connection, the speech compression needed to be dialed down and the MIC-gain set at around only "5" to prevent
overloading the transceiver when feeding it AFSK RTTY tones.

While after the contest, the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN) documented the fact that WQ6X
was being heard throughout USA and Canada, participation in this RTTY GiG was WaY less than expected, weird Space-WX notwithstanding.  Only 37 stations made score submissions to the 3830 Website: 15-HP, 21-LP & 1-QRP.  WQ6X took 16th place overall and 3rd place for CA.

The typical SPRINT contest run like this: 2-hours on 20-meters (altho I lost 35 minutes cobbling together the proper RTTY cabling), transitioning to 40-meters for approx. 1.25 hours, transitioning to 80-meters for around 45-minutes, with some back and forth during that last hour between 80 and 40.

Having missed the 2nd (and final) 40-meter WAE opening, with little being heard on 20-meters, it was off to bed to get an earlier start on 15-meters Sunday morning (15:30z).  After 11-QSOs, a switch was made to 10-meters, hearing CR6K (on 28465).  He asked for "QTC?" giving me the 1st opportunity pass a book of 10 QTC messages.  After that 10-meters was a no-Show for the rest of the contest.  As the day continued, I was able to pass all but the last-4 QTC messages.  At LEAST I could say
that I gave the WAE GiG as good as effort as the Space-WX would allow.

One of my biggest complaints with working EU stations in DX contests is that they send CW too
fast (35+ wpm generates more repeats than it saves time) and they speak their callsigns too rapidly. 

Have you ever wondered why your rate is slow?  Maybe it's because you blurt-out your callsign
too rapidly.  If we can't figure out your callsign, then YOU are wasting yours and EVERYONE
else's time.  Take the time to REHEARSE saying your callsign SLOWLY, then after awhile,
you can say it just a bit faster.

After the contest weekend, there are STILL Space-WX storms "raging" around the globe.

DiD YOU work the WAE and NA SPRINT RTTY contests?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?