In August we took a chill weekend camping trip up to the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. With a planned weekend of doing very little I grabbed a couple radio bags and added them to the camp gear, you know, just in case.

Antenna

For this outing I only took the trusty Chameleon tactical delta loop (CHA TDL) mounted on the rock-solid Bosch BT160 contractors tripod using the Chameleon (CHA SURVEYOR-A). I also used two 27” extensions (CHA SINGLE-EXT) on top of the tripod to raise the loop as high as I could. I connected this to the radio with 25’ of choked RG-316 (CHA RG-316).

The final results can be seen here.

Chameleon CHA-TDL

Radio

The radio I took was my go-to camping HF rig, the Lab599 TX-500. The main reason for liking this for camping is that it’s so rugged, it can deal with the dust of a summer site and the occasional rain of an August outing in the mountains. I keep the radio and a bunch of accessories in a really the really nice large gear case by Nestout, which also makes a handy flat surface as you can see.

Lab599 TX-500

I did buy the BP-550 battery box which I’m using here, so no need for any power cables.

Results

Not good. The 6m band was closed all weekend, and while I did hear some really weak signals on 10m I couldn’t scare up a response to any CQ. On the other hand, it was intended as a chill weekend and I got to practice putting this antenna up again and watched it deal with some wind too. I spent some more time with the TX-500 manual as well and some of the less used menu settings so it really was a nice weekend.