A great deal of energy is expended on the notion of operating portable. I've talked about this plenty of times. Issues like power, antennas, suitable radios, logging, transport and time of day all come to mind. Some activities are framed specifically as portable operations. Things like Summits On The Air, or SOTA, Parks On The Air, or POTA, World Wide Flora and Fauna, or WWFF. There's field days, portable contests and specific activities like the 2014 activation of FT5ZM on Amsterdam Island and the 2016 activation of VK0EK on Heard Island. I mention those last two specifically since I had the distinct pleasure of meeting those teams and had the opportunity to interview each amateur whilst enjoying a typical Aussie BBQ. I'll point out that no shrimps were thrown anywhere. You can find those interviews with FT5ZM and VK0EK on my website at vk6flab.com.
Each of these activities are framed in the context of the activity, as-in, you climb a mountain with a radio and then you make noise.
That's not the only way to go portable. One of my friends checks in to the weekly F-troop as a portable station most weeks. Glynn VK6PAW gets in his car, drives to some random location and participates from wherever he happens to be at the time. In doing so, the radio part of it, is the add-on between leaving home and arriving at a destination for a cup of coffee.
Charles NK8O works all over the United States. When he checks into F-troop, he's rarely in the same place two weeks in a row. In between work and sleep you'll find him activating a nearby park. He's been doing this for quite some time. While this is a POTA activity, he finds parks that fit into his life, rather than point at a park and make a specific trip there to activate it.
Before I continue, I'd like to mention that I'm not dismissing making a specific trip. Far from it. The point I'm making is that making any such trip is extra work. It's an added activity in your life. Whilst entirely enjoyable, there's plenty of times where that's just not possible.
Instead I'd like to look at this from the other side.
Both Glynn and Charles have a radio with them. Perhaps not all the time, but often enough that they can activate their station when they happen to be in a suitable location.
I've similarly put a radio into my luggage when going on a holiday. It might transpire that it stays there, or it might be that I happen to find a picnic table at the side of a water reservoir that happens to be in the shade and just begging to try a radio at.
In other words, if you have a radio handy, you can handily use it when the opportunity comes to pass.
So, what do you bring with you? If you're like Charles, you'll have a QRP radio, a Morse key, a battery and a wire antenna. Glynn has a vertical that lives in his car and the radio is bolted in.
For a while I had my radio permanently mounted in my car and I suspect that will return there in the not too distant future. It was removed for a service that involved the transmission being replaced after it failed after only a 140,000 km on the clock. Thankfully a fellow amateur had a spare car we could use, but I wasn't game to drill holes for an antenna and I'm pretty sure they were pretty happy about that.
The more I look at the activities that others report on, the more I have come to realise that the people who get on-air the most are the ones who have found a way to weave radio into their day-to-day life, rather than rely on specific amateur radio activities and plans.
I confess that I miss sitting by a local lake making noise or finding a random car park with shade that is just begging for someone, anyone, to turn on a radio and have a go.
So, how do you approach radio in your life, and how might you find ways to incorporate it into the gaps?
I'm Onno VK6FLAB
I like your perspective, and hope to offer a new facet.
I travel a lot for work, and as a result, we gave up a fixed QTH about four or five years ago. My life is /M or /P. I also noticed in retrospect that I had nearly stopped going to any kind of park or outdoor space; this intensified during the pandemic whilst living in a country which took the lockdowns quite seriously.
When I recognized that my spouse and children were not getting to enjoy the outdoors as much as they should, and I not as much as in my youth, I decided to make portable and mobile ops my radio life. Sure, it won’t always be that way, but I needed to start somewhere. Without a fixed QTH, this leaves portable and mobile ops. My shack is a pelican case and a larger military style backpack. No idea where the soldering iron I just picked up will go.
But I’m happy for it, my spouse seems supportive, and my kids get to touch grass (or sand, as I recently tried to activate White Sands Nat’l Park), and I get to play radio for a portion of that outing.
In short, you’re right, the ops I enjoy are the ones I’ve incorporated into my life, this necessarily includes my spouse and kids. For me, it’s the only way I get to be on air, though sometimes I am a little envious of having a fixed QTH radio shack.
For most of my first decade as an amateur my shack was the family car. I had a radio in my office to access the local repeater, but HF was strictly QRP potable.
Having a "fixed" shack means that it's theoretically always ready, but I have rarely been on HF for several years. One of the reasons is that my voice carries throughout the house, so being on-air is a disturbance when I'm not home alone.
I've been working on alternatives, but I'm not there yet.
So, envious as you might be, it's a double edged sword :)
I like this open-minded view of what contitutes a ham shack. I feel that ham radio would be in a much better place with this kind of acceptance. My ham shack is two side-by-side folding TV trays, a hacked-up CB radio made to work on ham bands, and a used mag loop because that's all that works under my physical home restrictions. I sit on on old step stool.
But do I make QSOs? You bet I do!