The Gun Test Stand (GTS) is an enclosure built adjacent to the FEL vault housing a copy of the FEL DC electron gun for dedicated electron beam studies. On March 14, 2008, the first electron beam was generated after overcoming many challenges during the installation, most of the time in parallel, of multiple systems and gun assembly under strict cleanliness requirements. Once the enclosure and the gun were ready for operations, the electrodes were high voltage conditioned in a laborious and intensive, 3-shift operation that took over 200 man-hours to complete at a rate of 1 kV/hour. Some preliminary results on surface charge limit emission observations will also be presented.