The other day I was packing the car to go on a little trip an hour out of the city to see the Milky Way. I briefly entertained the idea of bringing my radio gear with me to get on air to make some noise.

I resisted the urge, mainly because thinking about this didn’t fill me with joy, rather it made me groan.

Now to be absolutely clear, I adore going out into the scrub with my radio gear. I love getting on air and making noise. I like doing this with friends.

If the time spent is about amateur radio, in other words, if I’m doing this with other amateurs, preparation and set up are part of the experience.

However, if I’m on my own, or with my non-amateur SO, significant other, then preparation and set up often take more time than the actual on-air activity and by the time that things are humming along, we’re ready to do something else, fine food, nice view, coffee, you name it, anything other than radio.

So, how can I make the preparation and set up to be something much less time consuming? I don’t really want to take over our car and bolt the radio back into it, nor do I want to strap a multi-tap antenna to the roof. At the other end, I also have no desire to bring a wire, look for a tree, do some throwing, find a place to sit and do the rest of the preparation to get on air.

In other words, I want my cake and eat it too.

What might that look like?

One of my fellow amateurs has a telescopic whip, looks like a transistor radio antenna on steroids, but using that requires that you bring something to tune it, given that the ground is going to influence the antenna in unexpected ways.

I could go out and buy a QRP radio with an in-built tuner, make the whip as long as it goes, perhaps even make it into a vertical dipole by combining two and start playing, but I’m not there yet.

Of course I’m not the first to try any of this. The Parks On The Air and Summits On The Air activators are all over this type of activity, hopefully they’ve written some of their learnings down. I confess that I haven’t found anything yet.

How much of this have you achieved? What compromises did you make, what modes do you use when you’re operating like this, mind you, I can hear my friend Charles NK8O from here, “Use Morse Onno”, so I can take that as a given.

All I need to do is learn it.

I’m Onno VK6FLAB