Noise is pretty bad in the city. You have to realize that you are going to be responding to other people's CQs, not calling your own. There is just too high a risk of the receiver being able to hear you, but you not being able to hear the reply.
I routinely operate out of my 1st floor apartment in Brooklyn with 5W into a magloop antenna and can make contacts across the country. I've had the best luck on 40m, and 30m works well too. 20m is pretty much unusable for me, and it's a popular band, so that kind of hurts. Using FT8 or CW works better than voice (par for the course when running QRP). If you take your rig out to a park, the noise floor drops dramatically.
You certainly have to make more of an effort than someone in the country with a 5 element beam on a tower, but you can still make a lot of QSOs in subpar conditions.
(Also worth noting is that we're at the bottom of a solar cycle, so HF isn't amazing for anyone right now. A few years ago, I could reliably listen to WWV and WWVH at the same time. But I haven't heard WWVH for ages. Aloha!)
I routinely operate out of my 1st floor apartment in Brooklyn with 5W into a magloop antenna and can make contacts across the country. I've had the best luck on 40m, and 30m works well too. 20m is pretty much unusable for me, and it's a popular band, so that kind of hurts. Using FT8 or CW works better than voice (par for the course when running QRP). If you take your rig out to a park, the noise floor drops dramatically.
You certainly have to make more of an effort than someone in the country with a 5 element beam on a tower, but you can still make a lot of QSOs in subpar conditions.
(Also worth noting is that we're at the bottom of a solar cycle, so HF isn't amazing for anyone right now. A few years ago, I could reliably listen to WWV and WWVH at the same time. But I haven't heard WWVH for ages. Aloha!)