Terry W8ZN and I (Andy K1RA) had all the best intentions of activating 6 grids covering western Pa. and western Va. during the contest, but Murphy stepped in again to curtail our plans.  It started Friday night before the contest when one of our front brakes locked up on the van.  We were able to fix that in a few hours after a trip to the local Autozone. We were still testing equipment that evening, but after several minor issues, everything seemed to be working well in the driveway.  After a 2 hour drive Sat. morning to FM19aw and making only a few microwave QSOs, we discovered our 2m transverter died with a blown GasFET.  Since we couldn't fix it in the field, we made the command decision to turn back around and head home to replace it since 2m is our bread and butter band.  By Saturday evening we were debating what to do after the repair job.  We opted not to drive another 3 hours to pick up our original course at FN00rg, but instead stay closer to home in case anything else went wrong.  Hepburn predicted good tropo to the west Sunday morning from FM08, so we opted to head about an hour away to FM08us.  We were on the air around 9pm and operated until about 2am.  We had a few nice DX tropo contacts on 2m to the west around midnight to include N4QWZ EM66 @ 500mi., KO0Z EM59 @ 580mi., K0DOK & K0TPP EM48 @ 690mi.and K2DRH EN41 @ 700mi.  We hoped DX would be better at sunrise as predicted, so we got about 4 hours of sleep in the van and attempted to be on the air by 630am Sunday morning.  I step out to take a few pictures around the van when I awoke and when I got back in the van, Terry said something had gone up in smoke.  Turns out our Arduino based, rover switching controller had died.  That put us completely out of commission.  We packed up and spent the rest of Sunday in Terry's driveway completely ripping the operating area out and reworking the station.  Something we'd talked about doing for some time given the inconveniences we suffered when trying to work on and replace equipment when we'd had failures.  See pictures below of the rover in the driveway (FM18dv) before the contest, at FM19aw, FM08us Saturday evening and Sunday morning and finally late Sunday after the deconstruction.  We hope to be back on the air in full force for the ARRL Sept. VHF 2017 contest.