Two of the essentials for portable operating (well, actually, for any operating, but…) are an antenna to radiate your signal and capture signals you want to receive, and feedline to get signals between your transceiver and the antenna.

The difference between portable operating and your home station are generally going to be that you need to be able to carry the antenna and feedline to and from the operating site, you’re going to set it all up before operating and strike it all afterwards, and you’re facing different constraints on what is allowed - said constraints varying depending on where you will be operating

Antennas

Given the need for portability, you’re not going to be setting up a big multi-band Mosley Beam on a big tower. In general you’re going to want the antenna to be as simple as you think you can get away with, just to make setup and teardown and quick and easy as possible.

All that said, there are certainly plenty of hams who set up a hexbeam on a relatively short mast in order to activate a park for POTA.

Antenna support

If you’re setting up an antenna a home, you probably have a wide variety of choices to support the antenna up in the air. If you’re putting up an antenna in a park, you’ll have limited choices.

Note that some antennas (most notably, 1/4λ verticals that use a telescoping whip as the radiating element) are self supporting, which can be a big time saver as well as dramatically reducing setup and teardown times.

Lines in trees

In some areas of the country, you can simply throw a line over a branch of a tree, and use that line to haul your antenna up into the air. The usual, preferred method is to use an arborist’s line and throw bag (or impromptu subsitute) to get the line up over the branch. In some places, though, lines in trees are strictly forbidden. In US national parks, for instance, lines in trees and stakes in the ground are forbidden.

It’s wise to know what rules you’ll be facing before you arrive, or else to have a variety of choices in your kit so that you can handle any situation.

This drives home one of the general principles of portable operating: sometimes you’re just going to have to deploy some ingenuity and adaptability to handle the situation. Having more than one choice is never a bad thing.

Masts

Most of the parks where I might do POTA activations don’t allow (or discourage) lines in trees, so my preference for getting part of an antenna up high is to use a telescoping fiberglass or carbon fiber mast.

Inexpensive fiberglass masts are often marketed as fishing poles. One thing to watch out for is the collapsed length, which can often be as long as 4-6 feet, which makes it hard to transport the mast.

Carbon fiber masts are light, often collapse to very short lengths, and are my preference. The downside is that the carbon fiber is conductive, so it will affect your antenna if you deploy it very close to the mast for the entire length. In practice I haven’t found this to be a problem - I just lean the mast a bit and let the antenna hang a foot or two away from the mast.

Popular antenna styles

loaded vertical whip

There are a lot of options for vertical whip antennas that use a loading coil to achieve resonance, ranging from little QRP only setups like the Elecraft AX1/AX2 all the way up to QRO antennas like the Buddipole or Wolf River Coil setups. In almost all cases they use a telescoping whip as the radiating element, and wire radials as the counterpoise, either elevated and tuned, or on the ground and untuned.

Those antenna systems that have an adjustable loading coil allow you to tune the antenna to a particular operating band, and are handy if your transceiver doesn’t have an antenna tuner (and many QRP rigs do not).

It’s not uncommon for hams who activate from their vehicles to have a screwdriver antenna mounted on the vehicle; they can just roll up, park the car/truck, turn on the radio, and they’re QRV. Hams who use Yaesu FT-891’s often swear by the ATAS-120A, as that radio can control the antenna directly.

1/4λ vertical whip

A common arrangement is to use a 17’ telescoping whip as the vertical radiating element, and 2-4 wire radials just laying on the ground. A good example of this (and my favorite) is the Chelegance MC-750, which has a marked telescoping whip that allows you to rapidly set the length for bands 40m thru 6m. Because the radials are on the ground, there’s no need to adjust the radials as you change bands, which makes band changes very fast.

The MC-750 comes with four wire radials, about 18ga, with banana plugs on the end. I found the banana plugs hopelessly fragile, the supplied wire stiff an unmanageable, and the winder supplied was painfully slow to use and not at all satisfactory. I made two sets of two radials - each pair terminates in a higher quality banana plug, with plenty of heat shrink as strain relief. The radials are made out of BnTechGo 22 gauge wire, which is very supple. When I deploy the antenna, I just hold the banana plug and throw the coiled up wires, which land on the ground in a straight line. I then plug the banana plug into the antenna base, and then rearrange one of the wires to 90 degrees from the wire I leave. I do this for each pair, it takes about 30 seconds total, which makes the antenna a lot faster to deploy.

Another 1/4λ whip setup I’ve used quite a bit is a telescoping 17’ whip on top of a triple magnet magmount on the roof of my car. This setup takes only seconds to deploy or strike, and it is almost always what I use if I am going to work from inside the car.

Note that Chameleon Antennas now sell a longer 25’ whip that gets you 1/4λ on the 30m band without using a loading coil.

EFRW & EFHW

I have end-fed random wire antennas aplenty: two from Tufteln (one QRP, the other good for 100W), one very compact one using a K6ARK kit, and one from Packtenna.

All of those are great choices. In recent practice, doing relatively short duration activations at wildlife areas close to my home, I’ve found the Packtenna to be the one that goes into my pack nearly every time. Having the winder, unun, and wire all one unit is just so convenient that when I’m choosing, that’s the one I choose.

The Packtenna EFRW also has the advantage that the radiating wire is 29 feet long, which makes it a vertical when raised with the POTA33 mast.

For EFHW wire antennas, again I have examples from Tufteln and Packtenna, and a trail friendly version from Par. The Packtenna 20/40m EFHW allows you to raise the entire length for a 40/20/15/10 antenna, or just the shorter segment to get 20/10 coverage (and 17/15/12 using a wide range tuner like the one in the KX2). For that reason, along with the single package with no separate winder issue, the Packtenna EFHW is generally the one that goes into my pack when I head out.

Raising wire antennas

On the east coast of the US it seems everyone uses throw lines over tree limbs to pull their antennas up. Here in WA state, most parks and wildlife areas forbid putting lines or wires in trees, and as a result if I use a wire antenna I invariably use a telescoping mast to raise the antenna.

For masts, I have three: a 10m fiberlass mast Jackite brand, a 10m carbon fiber mast Explorerer POTA33, and a 20 foot carbon fiber mast Explorer POTA20

The Explorer POTA20 replaced a Sotabeams mast of the same length. The Explorer mast is more rigid overall and especially at the highest segment, where the Explorer mast is still fairly rigid and the SOTABEAMS mast is essentially useless (the top segment on my SOTABEAMS mast has actually broken).
On top of the rigidity different the Explorer masts have great eyelets at the top, whereas the SOTAbeams mast has a cruddy thread to tie something to.

By far the great thing about the Explorer masts is that they collapse to a very short package - short enough to put in your carry on bag or backpack. Both are also very light.

The easiest way I’ve found to put up a mast is to attach it to something - any sort of post will do, and I’ve got clamps that let me attach the mast to the table and seat portion of a picnic table.

In wildlife areas where posts and tables are in short supply, I use guy lines to hold the mast upright. Stakes are currently allowed, so I set one tent stake at the base of the mast, with a cordage loop holding the base of the mast, and then three stakes set out roughly a meter away from the base, with paracord running up to CamJams. This setup is quick to erect, easily adjusted, and equally fast to strike.

Feedline

I’m a big fan of coax feedline from ABR Industries with a protective mesh shell and ferrite chokes at the radio end. I have a 25’ length and a 50’ length of ABR240, which is an RG8X class of coax, with male BNC connectors. The protective mesh is bright orange on one and fluorescent yellow-green on that other, which makes it easy to distinguish one from the other and pick the one I want out of the coax bag. It’s also very visible on the ground, which makes it easy for me to avoid stepping on it and reduces the chance someone else will come by and either step on it or trip over it.

If I’m doing a setup relatively close to my car, one or the other of those gets used. I’m a big fan of the over/under method of coiling coax, and when I’m setting up I simply stand where the radio will be and fling the coax toward where I want to put up the antenna. The coax will fall in a more or less straight line, and I pull it back enough to leave a loop at the radio end, then walk to the antenna end, make another loop, and set the antenna up with the feedpoint at that spot. The two loops are insurance in case someone or something snags the coax and pulls it, as the loops will prevent having the attached radio dragged off a table.

I also have several lengths of RG316, including one a 15’ length from ABR with a bright red mesh jacket. The RG316 from ABR is, I think, nicer and more manageable than off-brand RG316, and that’s the length I generally use if I’m doing a walk-on activation or traveling.

RF connectors

I see in various YouTube videos that lots of hams use PL-259 connectors on their radios and coax for field work. I hate PL-259 connectors. They are:

• not as good transmission wise as N and BNC connectors
• Slower and less reliable to connect/disconnect than BNC connectors
• prone to threading problems that stem from American PL-259 thread specs being ever so slightly different from the Japanese M connector which generally everyone thinks is a PL-259. Honestly it’s hard to think of a way in which the PL-259 is superior to BNC for operating at less than 100W in the field.

As a result every bit of gear I use in the field is either natively BNC connectors, or else is permanently fitted with an adaptor to BNC. In general my coax, when coiled, has the two ends tied together with a BNC female/female barrel, which when I’m throwing out the cable, prevents dirt from jamming into the male BNC connector on the end.