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My next trip was to Karkku, which is a former Finnish county now a part of Sastamala county. We drove about one hour to Lake Ritajärvi protected area. This place is quite large and there are several options where to operate. We went to the parking place near Lake Alinen Ritajärvi (=lower Ritajärvi), from where a marked path to the lake started. Not an easy task with all my QRO equipment as it was about 600 meters walk. The place itself was nice, there was a fireplace, a building to arrange the meetings, a toilet and the wooden benches and tables. So I could build very comfortable place to operate. And I could set up the antenna also nicely just few meters from the lake. Before I started to operate Saku OH2NOS came to visit. Saku is the prominent Finnish WWFF-activator and he is not living too far from this place. We chatted a while and same time I build station up. There were also lots of other visitors in the site, this lake seems to be extremely popular among the hikers.

Operation went smoothly. This is the 2nd activation of this reference. Very good pile up in the start on 40m CW. I worked 36 qsos in 17 minutes before moving to 40m SSB which produced nice pileup as well. From here 20m SSB was also in a good shape. Perhaps the reason was that I started operation around 10Z, later than normally. Total qso count was 160 with 132 unique hunters. Operation time was 2 hours and 10 minutes.

OH2NOS filmed a short YouTube-video:

Next site was not too far from Lake Vuonajärvi. Direct path is less than 9 km but via road it is of course longer. Now my station was right in the middle of the forest. I also found that I lost my plug from CW paddle to Lake Vuonajärvi. Fortunately I had another one in my headphones, the negative side was that I needed to listen without headphones.

I noticed that my signal was weaker from here. I got lots of 559 reports when I started on 40m CW. But still it took only 26 minutes to reach 44 qsos. It was nice to work P2P-qso with OH2NOS/P who was from Koskeljärvi OHFF-0542. He was something like 35km from my place. I finished my operation after 1 hour and 24 minutes. So far my lowest qso count (but also the shortest time): 115 qsos but ok 111 unique hunters.

I uploaded few videos to YouTube:

New weekend and I planned to do double-double activation this weekend. Weather forecast was a bit unstable but at the end wx was quite ok during the daylight hours. OHFF-0244 Vuonajärven luonnonsuojelualue or in English Lake Vuonajärvi protected area was a new one for WWFF. This area is not far from Pinkjärvi OHFF-0237, just slightly more south and on the other side of E8-road. The protection area itself is few hundred meters from Lake Vuonajärvi and it was nice, calm pine forest with the rock base. We found a good place to park our car and I decided to set up the station on the rock to the few meters higher ground only maybe 50 meters from the parking point.

Again I started on 40m CW and the pileup was deep. I managed to work “the mandatory” 44 qsos in 21 minutes. From Vuonajärvi 40m SSB was also running very nicely – 42 qsos only in 19 minutes! So location was good although the lake itself wasn’t helping – it was in the SE direction. Added more contacts on 80, 30 and 20m and packed after 1 hour and 45 minutes. Logged totally 163 qsos and 143 hunters – exactly same amount of unique calls than from OHFF-0170.