I got a late start on this years VHF Contest. As a matter of fact I did not start setting up till late Sunday morning. That is almost a whole 20+ hours after the contest had started. My wife and I went to Schell Osage Conservation Area near Schell City, Missouri. It has some camping areas and a fishing lake. This is also the place where we did the January VHF Contest in 2018. That contest I did pretty good for just running 2m only. This year I added 6m to my arsenal. Sad but true, 6m was dead this year. Oh well there is always next time. I am slowly trying to build a VHF station. My main key here is to ALWAYS have fun and never get discouraged. This the best hobby in the world.

I did manage to make a couple of contacts on 2m running about 50w and tried many attempts on 6m running 100w with a 3el yagi at about 18 foot above ground.

Also enjoy the video at the bottom of this article…

I forgot my UHF to SO239 adapter. I did have some cheap coax and a knife so I improvised and ran the center conductor to and the ground to their prospective places and it worked. I am very surprised that I made any contacts at all on 2m.

I did noticed that I had a major malfunction when setting up 2 yagi antennas. I did manage to have them facing 180 degrees opposite of each other. This was my first time setting up this configuration so it is a learning segment for me to remember in the future.