Hello all! It’s been a hot minute since I sat down and wrote about something! Today I’m writing about a car camping trip I took last weekend to Mt. Hood National Forest and some experiments with communications I did. Some of this is actually about cellular comms and some is about amateur radio fails. We spent the night at two spots – one at about 1,100 ft. and another around 3,500 ft. This becomes relevant mostly because of cell coverage, but also to some extent regarding stations I was able to receive doing SWL (shortwave listening).
High gain antenna mounted to cargo basket on the top of the car 
A pile of cables surrounding the WeBoost Reach Drive RV and the low gain antenna
The first night we spent I didn’t get a chance to set the portable HF radio up, but I did test my new WeBoost Reach Drive RV. I had no cell service with Verizon at that location and decided to mount the WeBoost high gain antenna on the the cargo basket. I then attached the small low gain antenna and connected the setup to my 40AH Bioenno LiFePO4 battery. After cycling my phone into and out of airplane mode I had 1X and enough service for voice calls. I did a couple tests and was able to reach a couple people via telephone as a test. Not bad! The cell booster drew approximately 1A at 14v using the DC hardwire power supply which I fitted with Anderson PowerPole connectors in a “right hand red” configuration to match my off grid power setup.
We found the second spot much earlier and had some daylight to set up. This spot was much higher in altitude than the first spot and was much colder. The weather was pretty rainy so we erected a shelter using a synthetic tarp, tarp poles, and some paracord that we keep around just for such an occasion. I intended to do some HF radio work but I couldn’t tune my hybrid Superantenna / Chameleon Mil Whip 2.0 setup to save my life so instead I figured I’d do some SWL later at night. In the mean time I decided to test the WeBoost again since the setup was fairly easy. I set it up again and cycled my phone into and out of airplane mode. I was getting a 3G signal at first with occasional bursts of 4G before I fired the system up, and after it was all said and done I had fairly solid 4G service with a decent speed test of 7Mbps. Even though I wasn’t able to tune my antenna on 20 or 40m I was able to do some excellent shortwave listening with the Lab599 TX-500. I was able to get the BBC World Service shortwave broadcast discussing the current COVID-19 situation in India on 6005KHz out of Ascension Island. I heard another station broadcasting in Arabic and playing music that I couldn’t find in listings. Both stations had some QSB, but the station in Arabic was significantly more faint with more significant QSB (irregular signal fading that occurs as a signal reflects off of the ionosphere). I suspect the higher elevation I was at helped me get stations much further away than I’d normally be able to in the metro Portland area. I’ve been able to pick up Radio Havana, Radio New Zealand Int’l, occasional Japanese stations, and lots of Chinese stations (if I’m up at 4 AM) in Portland. A good resource for finding shortwave stations is https://short-wave.info. I’ve also been able to reliably pick up a Russian numbers station designated M12 as well which broadcasts from Khabarovsk Russia.