I traveled to Costa Rica in 2023 with my portable antenna and got to operate from there. The pacific coast is a truly beautiful place with many different amazing things to do. This is one of the beautiful sights we got to visit.

The beach in Manuel Antonio National Park

Other than all that great stuff, I brought my radio equipment with me. I had my Yaesu FT-100 with me for HF operation and my Wouxon KG-Q10H for handheld operation.

I did manage to make one 2 meter contact using an external 5/8 wave antenna on my handheld. This was done via the repeater system in Costa Rica. This was done with the balcony using a mag mount antenna.

Originally I had booked a ground floor room, but got upgraded to almost the highest quality room in the resort I was at. This meant I could setup my antenna right out on the balcony. The balcony was actually enormous and shared with several other rooms. But I never saw anyone else using it so I had it all to myself to operate from.

Offshore view of the resort, arrow indicating approximately where I operated from

The antenna on the balcony, sticking through the concrete railing

The radio with the portable power supply and my laptop

The view from the balcony

So with this setup I was able to get the antenna working with a horizontal polarization far up above the coastline. The antenna is pointing almost directly south so the radiation pattern should be east-west with that configuration. I ended up mostly using the antenna on 15m & 40m. The antenna is far more efficient on 15m, but the lowest SWR I could get was about 1.8. I think the balcony was creating a bunch of capacitance to ground from the antenna that was making it difficult to tune on the higher bands. At night time, 40m was absolutely great however. I could run up to 100 watts on SSB and 40 watts on digital modes. The grid square for my location there is EJ79. I identified my call as KK4KYE/TI8, since I was in Costa Rica.

At one point while operating from the balcony I actually got to watch a mother humpback whale & her calf breaching in the ocean!

15 meters operation

On 15 meters I only used digital modes. It turns out FT8 frequencies are quite crowded nowadays. When I transmitted FT4 I actually got more signal reports on PSK reporter

FT8 reception reports from PSK Reporter on 15 meters

FT4 reception reports from PSK Reporter on 15 meters

Unsurpringly I had no issue working stations as far away as Japan without any problem.

40 meters operation

I only used 40 meters operation at night. I didn't realize this but Europe is reachable from Costa Rica almost entirely across open ocean. I pretty much immediately was able to use FT8 to contact Ukraine.

FT8 reception reports from PSK Reporter on 40 meters

I made multiple contacts into Europe using FT8 or FT4 with no problem. I also use JS8 and had multiple long QSOs with Hams in the United States!

Surprisingly, 40 meters worked great on SSB as well. I made voice contact with Romania and Bulgaria no problem. OE3DIA, LZ2ZF & YO7MPD were all operating in group and gave me signal reports from 5-7 to 5-9. I received all of them at 5-9 or better.