First time mobile in the snow

This past weekend I went camping with my son’s Scout troop in Gilmanton, NH. The Scouts were working on their Wilderness Survival merit badge and were planning to sleep in improvized snow shelters.

I used this as an opportunity to take my Xiegu G90 into the field for the first time.

I added these items to my current kit to go mobile:

Here’s my radio setup with snow shelters being built in the background.

Mobile ops in the snow may seem hardcore but it was a sunny and mild day. Great weather to be outside.

I swear that I was enjoying myself. I was very focused when I took this selfie.

Here you can see the camp table and chair.

I operated for about 2 hours and made seven contacts. I’m still learning my radio and did a lot of listening.

The noise floor at my suburban home is usually around an S3. Here in the wilderness of NH it was basically at zero.

I was hearing transmissions from UK and Germany clearly but the pile-up was too great and I moved onto other frequencies rather than queue up and break in.

Here’s a photo of the antenna from the radio setup. I used an arbor line to get an end-fed random length (EFRL) antenna about 30 feet into a tree and set it up in a sloper configuration.

Here is a pic of the snow shelter my son slept in that evening.