Hrm, looks like tomorrow is a beach day. I'm not exactly a beach person, but maybe I'll take the FT-817D and do some QRP ops down at the beach.
@ncommander are you going to do just voice or some digital mode with a laptop or similar?
Thinking about using my 817 some more this spring, but I have nowhere to put an antenna at my apartment - for HF at least.

@MoepMan I'm using the FT-817 as a VHF base station, right now, I'm just using it as a echolink gateway, but I think I can also get AllStar and other DV stuff so I can just use one of my Baofengs to be on nets.

I've been mulling a D-STAR radio as its the only digital voice repeater I could potentially hate, but damn they're pricey. I might also just suck it up and get a DMR radio and a MMDVM soonish ...

@MoepMan I actully don't think I've made a single voice contact. Def. no phone contacts on HF, although I could probably do it now if I tried ...
@ncommander ah, okay.
I was kind of wondering what modes you would do portable / at the beach.
@MoepMan I have a small chromebook, but I might just do phone (even at 5W, I should be able to make contacts). Learning CW and buying a key is on my TODO list
@ncommander I hope to catch the NCommander Pokémon one day, ever since I got my extra ticket last year.  
@pauliehedron well, I'm on HF on FT-8 fairly often. I also now have an echolink node up, although I need to figure out some more stuff w/ it ...