Portable From the Park (K3MCB/p/bbq)

   During lunch today Jeff, KJ4NVN and I went to the Fred Deadman Park here in Machester TN to do some mobile ops. We hadn't taken the time to scout the place for a good location but we figured we'd find something and make it work. When we got there we found a little pavilion with picnic tables underneath. I had hoped to find some kind of metal stake in the ground, not sure why there would be one but I was hopeful. We passed on the horseshoe stakes as they were in the ground at about a 50 - 60 degree angle. Vertical antennas kinda need to be.. you know... vertical. Jeff suggested we use the grill/bbq. After looking it over it appeared it was completely made of metal and the holes in the side where you adjust the cooking surface up and down would allow perfect connections for the antenna to mount.

   The equipment we used was a RadioShack HTX-100 10m radio with a max output of 25w. This was run from a 7ah SLA battery. We used a mobile antenna that I bought from a truck stop and cut from CB (11m) bands down to 10m with the help of a couple of elmers in town. We were only able to work one station while we were there, EA3CAC from Spain, at least I think he's from Spain. Amazon's cloud servers are having problems right now which means QRZ.com is currently down so I can't check exactly where he is located. 

   This was fun. I really enjoyed portable operating. I'm working on a few other ideas that would make portable operating even more fun. One of which is a 10/12/15/17/20m dipole that is resonant on each of those bands without a tuner. (Check out AD5X's article in the Dec 2000 issue of QST for more info). 

   One of the next radio related purchases I hope to make is a Ten-Tec Scout. I believe it is a 50w HF radio that would be very portable for things like this when I have just a little bit of time to do some operating from a portable location.

73,

Matt

K3MCB/p

EDIT: It was actually EA8CAC that we had the QSO with. He is located in the Canary Islands.