Field/Mobile Ops

Imagine you’re going on an adventure. A little out of state excursion, where nature abounds and state parks are plentiful. You have a couple full days allocated to grabbing your QRP rig, throwing a wire in a tree, and activating POTA parks to your heart’s content.

Sheer radio bliss.

You get to your first park, open your gear cases, and — much to your horror — realize that your wire antennas and ununs/baluns are in a bag you left on the bench at home. Your POTA dreams are over before they started.

Or are they?

This is where the trial and error experimentation aspect of the radio hobby really comes into play.

What I did have at my disposal was about 40 feet of 18 gauge speaker wire and a 4 foot section of 50 ohm coax with PL-259 connectors on each end.

One end of the speaker wire got shoved in the center pin hole of the SO-239 socket, careful to make sure the shielding covered the ground connector on the socket. Then the coax plug went in, holding the speaker wire in place, with the ground connector on the plug making as much contact as I could muster.

The other end of the coax ground ran to a grounded bolt on the car body, and the speaker wire got stretched out to a tree where I folded it back to as close to 33 feet as I could guess… And that reached a whopping 8 feet in the air at its absolute highest point.

The real star of this setup is the Xiegu G-90 transceiver. This radio will tune a vertical. It will tune a dipole. Heck, it’ll even tuna fish!

This setup tuned up to about 1.35:1, and dropped my 20 watts max down to about 16 watts going out the wire.

Voice modes were absolutely not going to happen with this rigging unless anyone was nearby to do some NVIS work, but I didn’t have the time to really invest in that today. The only real option was FT8 — and these situations are exactly what low signal strength digital modes were created for.

The result? 15 contacts in about a 30 minute window. Enough to activate a park!

If I have enough time tomorrow, I’ll hop on the local repeater network and see if anyone wants to try some NVIS phone on 20 meters… Or maybe I’ll see if I can cram enough Morse code refresher to operate CW… Or, better yet, maybe there’s someone in the area that can rustle up a spare 49:1 for me to buy.

The point, though, is that even with far less than ideal circumstances and gear, there’s always a way to enjoy a day playing radio.

Here are a few photos of what I managed to cobble together.

To say this has been a difficult solar cycle feels like an understatement. Not that I claim to be an authority—I’m still relatively new to amateur radio. I was licensed in May of 2020, and early on I heard plenty of “Old Timers” talk about how terrible the bands were.

“Just wait,” they’d say. “In a few years, you won’t believe how good it gets.”

Well… here we are.

A few years later, we’ve ridden up through the peak of the cycle and are now heading down the other side. And honestly? I find myself almost looking forward to solar minimum. That probably sounds backwards, but this cycle hasn’t quite lived up to the hype I was sold.

In fact, it’s been frustrating enough that I started looking into amplifiers for my Elecraft KX2. Nothing crazy—just something modest to bump my QRP signal up into the 35–50 watt range during what’s supposed to be the best part of the cycle.

Naturally, I started with Elecraft. If I’m running their radio, it makes sense to see what they offer. That led me to the Elecraft KXPA100 amplifier, which would effectively turn my KX2 into a full 100-watt station. It sounds perfect… until you see the price.

As of April 2026: $1,470.

That stopped me cold. For that kind of money, I could buy two Yaesu FT-891 radios. Which, as of right now, are about $730 each and already deliver 100 watts out of the box. It’s hard to justify spending more on an accessory than on a complete, capable transceiver.

So I kept looking.

However, what I found didn’t get much better. The only reasonably priced option was a kit from QRP Labs—a simple amplifier for about $30 that can push a QRP rig up to 50 watts… but only if you feed it 20 volts. If it is run from a typical 12.8V battery, you’re realistically getting around 25 watts. On top of that, it’s single-band.

Now, I love the price. But if I need multiple units for different bands, plus additional power considerations, the simplicity and portability of a QRP setup start to disappear pretty quickly. For the savings in price, I would need to expand my station to include a separate power supply and multiple amplifiers to cart to the parks.

And that’s where the frustration really set in.

Every amplifier I found that could take the KX2 to 50 watts or more ended up costing as much as—or more than—just buying a 100-watt radio outright. I completely understand paying a premium for a high-power amplifier that pushes well beyond what a typical QRO rig can do. But paying that same premium just to reach QRO levels? That’s a tougher sell.

At some point, you have to ask what problem you’re actually trying to solve.

If the goal is simply more power, then surely the easy answer is to buy something like a Yaesu FT-891 and call it a day. But for me, that’s not really the point. I chose the Elecraft KX2 for its portability, efficiency, and the flexibility it gives me in the field. I don’t want to replace that—I want to build on it.

So the search continues.

Somewhere out there has to be a balance between a portable, reasonably priced amplifier that doesn’t force one to bring an abundance of extra components and cables. Maybe it’s a kit. Maybe it’s something lesser-known. Maybe it’s something I haven’t even considered yet.

Either way, I’m not done looking. Because while the portability of the KX2 is great, there are times when a little extra power makes all the difference—and finding the right way to get there is part of the journey.