This year I decided to do things a bit different. I did not go to any of the local clubs field day activities, I set up in my back yard and the wife and I did our own field day.
I had a go box and rotatable portable all band dipole I wanted to try out and figured field day would be the perfect opportunity to put them through their paces.
I put the dipole up about 18 feet with a tripod base and a couple guy wires and the go box was to be operated on battery power with a solar charger…best laid plans, right?
The atmosphere was not completely kind to us, lots of QRN and QSB, in fact the QSB was terrible at times, folks giving their call signs would go from an S7 to an S1 in the space of their call…
after awhile I gave up on the dipole since I could not raise it up any higher effectively… so I strung up an off center fed dipole at 40’ center and about 20’ on the ends and things really improved.
We had a thunder storm come through Saturday afternoon that shut us down for a bit over an hour, then worked again for another hour or so… my youth is long gone so I had no plans of staying up all night for the numbers.
Got up and was back on the air at 7 am and worked about 4 more hours…then another storm blew in…
all in all I had a lot of fun, got to check out my projects and made all the contacts I wanted to…for the most part i could work anything I could hear…
the only odd thing about this year was that the weak signal stations we easier for me to work than the stronger signals…at least they responded well on the first call and some of the strong signals I had to call 3 or 4 times…
Sounds like it was fun, but a bit lonely. Personally I think it’s more fun to participate as a group. After all, the more the merrier. 
My son and I did have plans to attend field day with our local club, but I was too tired to go out anywhere and other things got in the way.
Traditionally we use Field Day as a father and son outing, and in the past we would do the all-nighter, but last year we were both fighting to stay awake by about 4 AM and we agreed we weren’t going to do the graveyard shift again this year. We missed the whole thing unintentionally.
I guess we’ll try again next year.