Large area 10×40‐cm Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory ‘‘field‐free’’ ion sources were used during the first 2.5 yr of the neutral beam injection heating experiment on the tokamak fusion test reactor. Although these ion sources were located inside magnetic shielding structures, interference from tokamak magnetic fields prevented beam operation under certain conditions when using hydrogen. The fields causing this interference have been studied, and modifications which allow operation of such sources in these fields have been made.