Thanksgiving portable in the backyard of the daughters house in Aurora, Colorado. I had the ICOM IC-706 with the MFJ 904H manual tuner with a wire going to the gutters. I had never tried loading up gutters before, so I figured why not. Using my MFJ antenna analyzer I tuned them up on 40m and made a few contacts. Then I loaded the gutters up on 20m and checked in to the Maritime Mobile Net. The net control was in Montreal, Canada. That was 977 miles from my location. WOW, that is awesome! I ended up making a 1,509 mile contact to WA7TOF in Maryland. Now that was awesome. Later that evening I tried 80m to Missouri. I could hear W0EBV and AA0KM but they could not hear me above their noise floor.

Playing HF radio is great. I plan on doing more radio in 2022 for sure. Especially more portable radio.