Well my plans for Field Day worked out pretty good. This was my first real go at Field Day ( have kind of played with it in the past ), and I thought I would share my success ( and failures ) with others looking to run pure solar and 1B on field day. I am only a phone operator right now, so my contacts weren't crazy high, but I did learn quite a few things. Plus the site turned out to be a very good one, and my new antenna worked quite well. Overall very happy with my true 1B operation.

The site is in the remote desert of Utah a very long way from any town. It is at the edge of a 1000 foot cliff facing east. Since I am in Utah, I figured the terrain advantage to the east would be key. So my plan was an 80m full wave delta loop fed with balanced line on a painters pole at the edge of the cliff. A G5RV was setup as a backup and facing N/S to cover my nulls on the loop. The delta loop was constructed from so called 'hot rope', and is designed with connectors so I can reconfigure it to be a straight dipole ( 20m to 160m ), an 80m loop, or a ZS6BKW.
 

My solar array included my standard 64 watt panel that is permanently mounted to the truck, plus two extra 30 watt panels added on through Andersen power poles and a splitter. Each panel has a diode protecting it against back charging. I was putting over 6 amps into the battery consistently. It ran everything on site, including a stirling engine cooler that kept the drinks cold.

 I was running an FT-DX3000 with an MFJ tuner tuning the balanced line. I also brought the LP-Pan2 to run as a panadapter, but honestly never found it necessary with so much traffic. The little scope on the FT-DX3000 turned out to be more than enough and I never fired up the laptop. I ran all of my logging on my galaxy tab, which draws ALOT less power. Everything was run off of power poles, greatly simplifying my life. I finally rewired everything to that before this trip, including my USB adapters and such.
 

The biggest things I learned:

Powerpoles for EVERYTHING is a very good idea. That saved me a lot of time. Don't discount 15m. When 20m was noisy and crowded, all of my contacts were banging on 15m. Hunting and pecking works, but things are so much easier when I finally found a spot and threw CQ out there. Unfortunately, I didn't try that until the last hour of the contest, and made contacts at a rate of over 1/minute for awhile. Live and learn. Other things learned, cedar gnats under the headphones are REALLY annoying. Also, when someone asks you to pass a message to another ham during field day, make sure it is not about an argument of 'whose frequency it is' because they can't hear each other, thus inserting yourself in the middle of an argument.

I hope you all enjoyed my story and my lessons. I sure had a fun time for my first true 1B.  Overall I ended up with over 200 phone contacts across 80, 20, and 15.

Jim
K7JEO