What a June VHF contest! Saturday, nowhere northern Oklahoma, I should have known something was up when an oddly armored vehicle approached me a few miles from my first grid corner. What started as a sunny day progressed to an evening with severe thunderstorms. As expected my "vehicle with all the antennas" attracted the attention of locals. I heard about a tornado that was 13 miles from my location moving towards me from a local farmer. Needless to say, no matter how good the band conditions, at some point you have to flee or take shelter. Realizing my proposed route would lead me into pretty nasty weather, I decided to go with my back-up rover route, which meant driving nearly 350 miles that night.

Next morning, in eastern Colorado, my first task was to fix the 50 Mhz yagi. In my haste to take down, the night before, I had broken 2 of its 3 elements. Back on the air, I soon found great conditions on 6 meters. Sunday was probably my best contest day ever and will be hard to repeat. Although I was only on the air for about half the contest, I had worked 220 grids and had over 800 contacts. Almost all were on 50 MHz. After the contest ended I discovered a bad cable connection in the 144 Mhz feedline. Something that may had happened the day before in my haste to dismantle the antennas.

Oh if you're wondering… the armored vehicle was one of those storm chasers. Note to self, next time I'm thinking about operating in tornado country, monitor the weather radio