Field Day is something that I have been looking foward to for quite sometime. Being a relitively new ham, I was excited to go to my first Field Day.  It was nothing like I had envisioned, but at the same time it was way more than I thought it would be.

We set up our portable tower in a local park in El Dorado Springs, Missouri. The park had a pavillion and power to run our equipment.

Come to find out, the electrical outlets had 120v when nothing was plugged into them. When we plugged in a radio, the volatage dropped to about 80 volts. So we had to regroup and rethink our set up. The generator on the tower trailer was not in working order. I had brought my 2-125 watt solar panels, 2-100 amp hour AGM batteries and a 750w inverter. We quickly set everything up to run off emergency power. Another ham, KB∅SQW, had also brought an extra battery. We hooked all batteries up in paralell and connected the radios to our battery bank. We also ran my refridgerator off 12v and my invertor to run our computer.

All batteries hooked up and running through the night.

Just before the sun came up!

Coffee was in order to give that little extra boost to make another contact. Had a total of 125 contacts all on phone.