06/25/2004 | N0DQS/R Wow, what a weekend! Started the contest in EN00/10 near Grand Island/ Central City,Nebraska. A little bit further south than normal. Got there Friday nite and discovered that from 2 meters on up was not very good. Saturday was not any better and to top it off there were thunder storms developing in about every direction and due to the lighnting it was just about impossible to hear anyone on 6/2/222 and was not going to get any better. Developed an early issue with 6 meters and never got the problem solved till Sunday. Had a storm to the East of me and another developing to the West and another to the north! Headed north to my next stop in EN01/11 and drove into and thru 2 more storms. The first was pretty intense, beat me up with golf ball size hail and developed a funnel cloud. Heard about it Monday on the news. Got a cracked windshield and lots to dents in the rover, had to straighten a handful of loops on the directive systems yagis. I had taken refuge on a side road under a huge tree ( dumb, later I thought since there was tons of lightning and lots of winds. I could see the headlines "rover crushed by tree" ) but was thinking only of keeping the hail off of the antennas. They got beat up a year earlier by golf ball size hail sitting in my drive way. Also on Monday I saw on the TV about a local Deputy whose patrol car got hit by lightning (with him in it) it melted his VHF antenna and blew the back window out) So apparently these vehicles are grounded pretty well in the rain.Any how after that storm blew over I again headed north and about 15 miles down the road another storm, with hail but much smaller but more of it. This hail drifted like snow up next to the houses and buildings and each tree you came to, well about half of the leaves were on the ground stripped by the hail. Again headed north and ran into heavy heavy rain, had problems with the highways and lots of fast moving water over the roads and in places 3-8 inches of mud and silt. Tricky when you hit that stuff and anything above 20 mph. In the mean time my qso count had be "zero" for quit a while. Again headed north. Finally ran out of the rain and was able to work a few. Biggest problem was my normal spots were really a mess with all the rain.Also I handed out a lot of handouts explaining what I was doing, due to all the bad weather a lot of people were going out of there way to talk to me since they thought for sure I was a storm chaser. I told them sometimes I was chasing storms and sometimes I was the chasee, actually the brochure explained quite well. By this time I was finally near Neligh,NE or should I say "only", I was looking far to the north as I was heading to South Dakota and watching another storm which seemed to just hang there. Hit my next grids in SD and headed north and for 3-4 hours watched my next storm as I headed for it. Any how I got into Mitchell,SD about2:30 AM local hit the Motel and about 5:30am it let go and about 9 am the lightning,wind and rain finally quit. By this time I was behind schedule 5-6 hours and just kept getting further behind. Still out of each contest or outing there is some new experiences, some good and well some less desirable. Oh and to top it all off I kept trying to get ahold of my son at home and finally got him on his Cell phone, storm went thru home and lighting hit a neighbor and took our phones out! Been a real wild season here this year for bad weather!
catch you all for the next one.
73 -- N0DQS