My wife and I planned on going to Rio de Janeiro Brazil for Carnival in 2025, so I got my IARP license and took some radio equipment along.
Equipment: Everything but the DC power bank was packed into a hard-ish case from Amazon (meant for sunglasses). It's claimed to be 9.6 x 7.3 x 2.75 inches; so 193 cubic inches of radio junk. Amazon Link. In it, 2 QRP-Labs QDXs; one for 40-15m, another for 10/12m. This gave me about 3.5-5w out depending on the band. I also took an Emtech ZM-2 tuner, and a 35 foot wire and 17 foot counterpoise. I had a 20m/10m EFHW I built from K6ARK components as a backup, a 2.8” screen NanoVNA as well as 2 sections of coax, 12 and 20 ft, and some miscellaneous accoutrements.
All packed up!I was staying at a family member's recently purchased penthouse apartment, and only had a vague idea of what I could do for antennas as far as access, etc. We ended up getting on the roof of this 11 story building, with varying roof tops. (This took a ladder climb, and then shimmying across some corrugated cement board roofing that had boards on it to spread weight out), up to the concrete cap that held the building's lightning rod and about 1/2 dozen broken TV antennas. I stuck the end of my 35 foot random wire under a brick, and we threw the other end to an apartment balcony, over the rooftop of the apartment I was staying in.
On the balcony, I set up my ZM-2 tuner on a chair, and dangled the 17 ft counterpoise down the side of the building. This balcony was BLAZING in the sun, so coax was snaked inside for operating, and the ZM-2 baked outside.
The ZM-2 allowed me to operate on all bands (40-10m) without any wire adjustments, and having the tuner at the antenna end of the coax for a random wire works well enough. RFI didn’t seem too bad on 20m on up there, but there may have been some desense, due to nearby cell towers and such, I'm not sure.
I was able to operate here and there in the afternoons and early evenings some of the days we were there; totaling about 7 hours over 6 days in late February and early March. I really worked for contacts, netting only 42 total; a VERY slow rate for FT8! Receive activity seemed fairly limited, and my transmit propagation directions seemed fairly limited as well. I suspect I had hills/mountains blocking things, as PSK reporter showed some interesting cutoffs in my signals. (FWIW: I tried transmitting 20m WSPR once, but NO one picked it up. Wild.) On the other hand, across the ocean into Africa, I seemed to get into OK, with no real hills blocking my signal in that direction. I had contacts in Namibia, Nigeria, and St Helena Island.
Results: While it took some effort, and I wasn’t radiating many watts, especially with my coax losing 1-1.5 db....it WAS a success. I mean, I flew the radio equipment 7000 miles away, had everything I needed to operate, and was successful with 42 contacts in 16 countries/DX entities, on 4 continents. Overall, that IS a win.
What did I learn, what would I do differently again? Not sure it was worth taking 2 QDXs, but didn’t know if I’d be operating daytime, nighttime, etc. Next time, I think I could get away with just 10/12m operation. Now that I’ve seen the setup, I think I could come up with a bit of a better antenna solution, too. I also think more watts would help, too. I could certainly not reach all of the few stations I was hearing, ones that I think I would have been able to with more power.
An interesting experience overall, and certainly learned some things to keep in mind for future portable/travel operations...and the whole experience got me more interested in doing more travel and portable operating.