Quick heat up, and it did a decent job on small solder connections. Not enough heat to tackle anything larger than maybe a few 12 gauge wires, or soldering to a crimp connector or ground lug, but not great for anything that can sink a fair amount of heat, so a bit weak for a PL259 connector shield on coax, but it can do it. It's basically about what you would do with a typical electronic soldering iron or soldering station, no more, no less. The included small 12V battery will give you a bit more than a half hour of run time, but I would advise turning it off between jobs if there's even a couple of minutes between connections. It heats up in about 30 seconds, so using it for short durations, even including the extra heat up time, should get you maybe 15-20 soldered connections before you need to swap batteries. Obviously you could add a much larger M12 battery pack, but then it gets a lot more tail heavy, which you may not like the feel of, but would work. It'll stand on it's end using even the smaller battery packs, as long as it's kept straight, and not angling the tip off at 90 degrees. There are also reports of leaving it run continuously causing melted plastic around the heating element, so short duration solder joints and shutting it off in between is the way I've been using it so far. If I need a continuously hot iron for 4 hours, I would drag a cord along and get it done, but for a few connections, I'm in and out with this battery powered one and almost no setup / cleanup time for dealing with cords.Outdoor use is a different story. Even the slightest breeze is enough to carry away quite a bit of heat, and leave you with a cold solder joint, or even leave the tip of this iron stuck in cold solder, and held to the joint, which happened to me. That's not really this tools fault - it's basic thermodynamics when you blow cool air over a 750 deg F tip, and even a gentle breeze will transfer away a lot of heat, and may give you trouble. You could setup a wind break (cardboard box around the job, tarp around your work area, etc), but that adds time. Some butane and propane soldering irons not only generate more heat, they use a MUCH larger mass for the tip, and if you can keep it away from the wind to reach temp, the mass of the tip might help you get the job done without needing a wind break. Not many other options for jobs where a full propane torch is too much for a smaller task without causing heat damage. If there's any kind of real breeze across the tip of this unit (even a 5 kt breeze), it's going to cause trouble with your soldering. So plan ahead if you need to solder outdoors, up on a roof, on top of an antenna tower, etc, so you don't get up there and can't keep the breeze from causing poor solder connections, or else look for alternatives to this Milwaukee tool if that's your primary use case.
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]