Contesting in an urban setting

Recently, I (Joni OH2EWL) accidentally ended up participating in a amateur radio contest. I was checking in pskreporter.info how things looked like on 6-meter band, and noticed that there was an unusual amount of local (to Finland) FT8 activity going on. Intrigued, I set the station up in the balcony and tried to get into the action. Which didn’t work out right away because, although I noticed that the traffic didn’t look normal, it took a while to understand that what was going on was “EU VHF Contest”. After some fiddling with WSJT-X settings, I was able to get the correct contest mode on and I was in.

This was exciting! Although my location (KP20le) is in the middle of an urban setting and I have a vertical against what are mostly horizontal antennas, and I can only get around ten watts into that antenna, I was able to make some QSOs. Not that many or that far away, but still, usually the 6-meter band is quite silent (from my point of view at least) but now there were many stations on air.

Today was another second Thursday of month and I participated from the start, making about the same amount of contacts as last time.

Here are the stations I was able to hear:

And who heard me:

For next month’s contest, I’m planning to go to the most prominent peak we have around here and work with a portable dipole. This should (in theory) improve the results significantly. But let’s see—