What use is an F-call?

Operating from your shack is a different experience from operating in another station. It's a completely different experience again if you operate your station portable.

At first glance, what's the problem, you pack your radio into a bag, travel to the destination and start operating. If you spend a little more time, you'll soon realise that you'll need to take many other variables into consideration. Things like power, coax, structures for your antenna, antennas, operating position and the like.

Let's start with power. Do you have access to mains power where you'll be operating, or will you need to bring a generator, or do you have batteries? If you have batteries, how will you charge them? Are the batteries going to last for the whole operation? How do you know?

Is any of the power system going to generate noise on HF? Did you actually test it?

What are you going to do about grounding, what about fuel, fire safety, fuses, etc.?

I could spend the next 40 minutes going through a list with caveats, gotchas and lessons learned, but ultimately, this needs to be your experience, so, before you go portable, sit down at your current station, happy and dry, and have a look around at all the things that go into the station running smoothly.

Now imagine sitting on a desert island and getting your signal out.

Make a list, in addition to recording what you're bringing, if there are more than one of you going on the outing, who's bringing it? Also include where an item currently is, include what its status is, for example, does it need a spare battery, or recharging, or repairing.

I've now been portable more times than I can count and while it gets easier with time, I can guarantee you that I'll be sitting at my station, looking around for a thing that I forgot.

Hopefully it won't be mission critical.

Before I forget, resist the urge to bring your whole shack. The car isn't big enough.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB