Decided I want to try and operate protable with my Yaesu FT-450D. It’s a bit big, but not too bad.

First step was buying a battery, I ended up at batteries plus and bought an 18 amp hour 12 volt AGM battery, it weighs about 12 pounds which is a little heavy looking back at it, this isn’t going to be a hiking battery for sure, this whole setup wont be. I’ll just use it for park operating and camping and stuff.

For the first trip we went to a local park, only a short drive away. The first thing I started to do was scope out a tree to toss my line up into to pull my 20m dipole up. Armed with my trusty rice filled sock (leftover from trying to figure out a way to operate out of my apartment, that’s another story for another time.) Anyway, this rice filled sock seamed like the perfect weight to attach to a line and toss through trees to haul my antenna with! If only I had remembered to attach a line to it before I tried to prove to my girlfriend that I could TOTALLY throw it over the branch that I had picked out. Which I did. Then it got stuck on a branch on the way down. Now I’m out a sock and some rice. I ended up using my MFJ-1622 portable antenna mounted on a tripod with a wood clamp.

It’s ugly, but it worked.

The bands were crap, and we didn’t make any qsos, but we had a nice lunch and heard venezuela and texas and lousiana and and and..I think we tried to make one contact.

Seems like the cheap case from harbor freight (that holds the radio/battery/signalink/mic) and gym bag (that holds the antennas etc) is an OK fit, next time I’ll take less gear, this time I took everything as I had no idea what I’m doing (I still don’t.)

Until next time.

73