so ive been wanting to do this for probably two years now and i finally just did it last weekend. built a little MTR-3B kit over the course of maybe three evenings, nothing fancy, just followed the instructions and tried not to burn anything. honestly the soldering was the scariest part because some of those pads are tiny but it came out working on the first power-up which i was NOT expecting.

took it out to the local park saturday morning with my end-fed half-wave strung up between two trees, ran it off a 3ah lipo and just started calling CQ on 20m. made 6 contacts in about two hours which i know isnt impressive to a lot of you but for 5 watts into a wire antenna in a park it felt pretty amazing. worked a station in germany which honestly made me laugh out loud sitting there on a picnic blanket.

anyway just wanted to share because ive been lurking here reading about QRP stuff for ages and it really does work. the whole experience of having basically a radio that fits in your shirt pocket making contacts across the atlantic is just... i dunno, it hits different than sitting at the shack. anybody else doing portable QRP stuff? curious what setups people are using for antennas especially.

That Germany contact on 5w from a park is legit, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. 20m can be magic when the band cooperates and an EFHW is honestly one of the better portable antenna choices you couldve made, good efficiency and easy to tune.

I've been doing SOTA activations with a homebrew 40/20 dual band rig for a couple years now and the antenna situation is always the thing that matters most. Lately ive been experimenting with a linked dipole instead of the EFHW just because i can drop it lower and still get decent radiation angle on 40 which is where most of the summit-to-summit contacts happen for me. But for park stuff the EFHW strung between trees is hard to beat for simplicity. What feedline were you using, just coax straight to the rig or a 9:1 unun?

the MTR-3B is such a good first build, i did the same thing like 18 months ago. mine actually didnt work first try lol i had a cold solder joint on one of the toroids and it took me forever to find it. six contacts in two hours for a first portable outing is really solid though especially if condtions werent amazing. welcome to the rabbit hole, it only gets worse from here haha