The path climbs through dusty bike trails and scrubland on the edge of Santiago, Chile. The city sprawls out below him—glass towers, apartment blocks, and the distant haze of one of South America’s largest urban centers. In his hands and on his back is everything required to operate in one of amateur radio’s most competitive global contests.
Radios. Batteries. Antennas. Masts. Laptop. Cables.
All of it carried in by hand.
In total, the load weighs about sixty pounds.
It takes two trips from the car to move the entire station into position. First the antenna gear and lighter equipment. Then the heavier items: batteries and a massive sun umbrella that will double as shade and operating shelter. After twenty minutes of hiking and another thirty minutes of setup, the portable contest station comes to life.
A Yaesu FT-891 sits on a small operating table beneath the umbrella. A laptop running N1MM waits to log contacts. Around the station, tripods and vertical antenna elements form what looks less like a portable field station and more like a miniature HF contest array.
Then Jason taps the key and sends the first CQ.
By the end of the weekend, he will log more than 800 contacts in roughly fifteen hours of operating.
From a station that had to be carried up a hill.
Jason’s portable contesting operation wasn’t born from romantic ideas about outdoor radio. It came from a far more common problem in modern amateur radio: noise.
He lives on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Las Condes, an upscale district just outside Santiago. When he first moved in, he expected to operate much the same way many hams do in apartments—running a discreet wire antenna from a window and making the best of limited space.
At first, everything seemed promising. The antenna went up easily, and the station came together quickly.
Then he turned on the receiver.
The S-meter immediately slammed to the right.
S9 noise.
“I couldn’t hear anybody,” he says. “The band was just buried.”
Urban radio frequency interference has become one of the defining challenges of modern amateur radio. LED lighting, switching power supplies, elevators, routers, solar inverters, and a thousand other electronics fill the spectrum with electrical noise. In dense cities like Santiago, the noise floor can make weak signals completely disappear.
Instead of fighting the problem, Jason decided to move his station somewhere quieter.
He began exploring parks and hills around the city—places far enough away from apartment blocks and electrical infrastructure that the bands would sound the way they were supposed to sound.
The difference was immediate.
Where his apartment receiver showed S9 noise, the hills often dropped to S1 or S2, opening the door to weak DX that would have been impossible to hear at home.
The first portable setup was simple: a quarter-wave vertical antenna and the same 100-watt radio he used in the apartment.
“It worked,” he says. “I logged about a hundred stations.”
For most operators, that would have been enough. But Jason is a contester.
And for contesters, a hundred contacts only raises one question:
How can we make this better?
Over time, the portable setup evolved.
Each trip into the hills became an experiment in how much performance could be squeezed out of a station that still had to be carried on foot. Antennas became more sophisticated. Power systems improved. Setup procedures were refined.
The result is something unusual: a contest station designed for backpack deployment.
The radio at the heart of the operation is a Yaesu FT-891, a rugged 100-watt HF transceiver known for its efficiency and relatively low power consumption. It’s small enough to transport easily but powerful enough to produce a competitive signal.
Jason runs it at full power.
“I need every watt,” he says.
Portable operators sometimes romanticize the idea of QRP—running five watts or less and celebrating every hard-earned contact. That philosophy works well in certain contexts, especially domestic contests in North America.
From Chile, however, the situation is different.
Most of the stations he needs to work are thousands of miles away, across oceans and continents. Weak signals struggle to compete in crowded contest pileups.
Running 100-watts dramatically improves his chances.
“People love the idea of QRP,” he says. “But from here, it’s not fun.”
Running a 100-watt station in the field requires serious battery capacity.
Jason’s power system consists of three lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries. Two of them are small eight-amp-hour Bioenno packs that he brought from the United States. Those batteries sit right at the maximum capacity allowed for airline travel, making them ideal for international operators.
The third battery was purchased locally in Chile and provides additional operating time, though at the cost of extra weight.
Together, the three batteries provide roughly eight to ten hours of operating time.
There is no elaborate battery monitoring system. Jason prefers to keep the station as simple and lightweight as possible.
Instead, he relies on a visual indicator.
“When the battery gets low, the screen starts to dim when I transmit,” he says. “That means I’ve got about a minute.”
It’s not much warning, but it’s enough.
Portable Beams on Tripods
The real performance gains come from the antennas.
Rather than relying on a single vertical or wire antenna, Jason deploys small directional arrays assembled from portable masts and tripod supports.
For the higher bands—10 and 15 meters—he uses what he describes as a two-element vertical beam. The design uses two vertical elements spaced to create directional gain, allowing him to focus energy toward North America and Japan.
On 20 meters, the system changes slightly. There he uses a parasitic vertical array, which also creates directional gain but with a slightly different physical configuration.
Both antenna systems are designed with portability in mind. The entire array can be transported in pieces and assembled quickly at the operating site.
Once deployed, the antennas face roughly north.
“There’s not really a whole lot south of here,” Jason says with a laugh.
The geography helps. Many of his operating locations sit on hillsides with clear drop-offs toward the Pacific and the northern hemisphere. In one location he discovered a site where the terrain falls away nearly 300 feet toward the United States.
For HF radio propagation, that kind of takeoff angle can make a dramatic difference.
Waiting for the Reverse Beacon Network
When the station is ready and the antennas are tuned, the operating process begins with a simple act: calling CQ.
At first, the frequency may remain quiet.
But modern contesting has an invisible helper: the Reverse Beacon Network. This worldwide network of automated receivers listens for CW signals and posts them instantly to spotting networks used by contesters around the world.
As soon as Jason’s CQ is detected, his call sign appears on cluster feeds across the globe.
Within seconds, the pileup begins.
“You immediately have a pileup pretty much,” he says.
The dynamic is particularly powerful on CW. Many multi-operator contest stations maintain skimmers and cluster monitors that alert operators whenever new stations appear on the band.
From a quiet hilltop in Chile, Jason suddenly becomes a multiplier that stations around the world want in their logs.
The Chaos of Twenty Meters
Not every band behaves the same way.
10 and 15 meters often produce orderly pileups where callers arrive in manageable waves. On those bands, Jason can settle into a comfortable rhythm of running stations and logging contacts.
20 meters is a different story.
“There was not a lot of CE activity on 20,” he says. “And it got chaotic right off the bat.”
On that band, stations from across North America and Europe can hear one another clearly, leading to dense walls of callers transmitting simultaneously.
To manage the chaos, Jason employs a technique familiar to experienced CW operators: he listens slightly above his transmit frequency.
Most callers naturally zero-beat the running station, transmitting exactly on frequency. By shifting his receive point roughly 200 hertz upward, Jason can isolate individual calls that stand out above the noise.
It’s a small adjustment that makes a big difference when dozens of stations are calling at once.
Even after years in amateur radio, certain moments still feel magical.
During CW Worldwide, a signal suddenly appeared on the band: JT1CO from Mongolia.
Not weak. Not barely readable.
Twenty over nine.
“I recorded it,” Jason says.
The signal seemed to appear out of nowhere while he was working stations in the United States and Japan. Whether the path traveled long-path around the globe or followed some unusual propagation route remains uncertain.
But moments like that are part of what keeps radio fascinating.
From his hilltop station, Jason has heard India in the early afternoon and even worked Hong Kong in the middle of the day during a contest weekend.
“That mystique of radio,” he says. “It never leaves.”
Portable radio and contesting do not always overlap.
Many Parks on the Air activators prefer relaxed operations—simple antennas, casual contacts, and short operating sessions. Contesters, on the other hand, often chase rate, efficiency, and competitive performance.
Jason occupies the narrow intersection between those two cultures.
He enjoys being outdoors and operating in quiet natural environments. At the same time, he approaches portable operation with the mindset of a contester—experimenting with antennas, optimizing signal strength, and pushing the limits of what a portable station can accomplish.
“I like being outside,” he says. “And I like trying to have a good signal.”
Over time, that combination has produced impressive results.
Operating portable from Chile, Jason has logged contacts with 127 countries. He has worked all fifty U.S. states on 10 and 15 meters and is only missing one state on 20 meters.
All from equipment that fits into a backpack and a duffel bag.
For now, overnight contest operations remain difficult. Jason has two young children, and family commitments mean returning home each evening.
But the portable experiments continue.
Each trip into the hills becomes another opportunity to refine the station: lighter equipment, faster setups, better antenna configurations.
The process has become part engineering challenge, part outdoor adventure.
And every time he hikes up those trails above Santiago, he demonstrates something important about amateur radio.
You don’t need a tower.
You don’t need an amplifier.
Sometimes all you need is a quiet hill, a few good antennas, and the willingness to carry sixty pounds of radio gear into the wilderness.
Then send CQ.
And see who answers.
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