07/29/2003 | W0GCJ Would the fortunes of Field Day smile on us once again with perfect weather for the entire 24 hour period? No!

At least Saturday morning started clear and calm after a few storms had moved through the area around midnight. Storms were predicted for later that night.

For 2003 the Marshall Co. ARC setup Field Day in Lion's Park in Marysville, KS. Once again we planned to operate as class 1A using a solar panel and battery as our primary power source thus eliminating the noisy generator and its maintenance demands. The operator list included AC, AE (visiting from Lincoln, NE), KYK, KCLS, NGE, NKN, NB, and several XYLs who saw to it that we had plenty of good things to eat.

Setup went well even though stringing up the G5RV was an interesting game of "Tossing the Weighted String Over the Perfect Limb". Several good laughs were had during this phase. Yes, there are ways to launch a line perfectly the first time, but why waste the opportunity to make a fool of oneself?

With the HF antenna in place our attention turned toward supporting the 6m and 2m loops. We quickly spied a pair volleyball net supports and dropped the push-up mast into one of them. The supports have old tires filled with concrete for stability and portability and worked perfectly for the light weight antennas. Unfortunately, neither 6m or 2m ever opened enough for a contact.

Around midnight (0500z) the storms rolled in as predicted. Fortunately, the heavy stuff split and went around to the south of us. We encountered some rain and moderate lightning. Of course, we kept the station unplugged and caught some sleep. Around 2 AM we deemed it same enough to put the station back on the air until about 4:30 AM when another cell rolled through keeping the station shut down until about 6:30 AM.

The rest of the FD period went by without incident although a nearby pavilion was host to a church group's potluck dinner which gave us an opportunity to answer some questions about Amateur Radio and provide some local PR.


We didn't make the most contacts, but we made up for it in trying a few different things again this year and we will work toward more success next year. It would have been nice to have 6m and 2m provide some openings, but they always seem rather dead on FD. We enjoyed meeting and playing host to AE who was visiting his folks in long term care in Marysville.

See you in 2004!

-- N0NB