Hiders:  Doug WA6RJN and William WB6MGT

Hunt report 2/22/20

I had a few ideas I wanted to try and had a hard time deciding until the weather changed. February was a dry month except for the one day it rains – Saturday. Looking at a hydrology map, the one place the looked the driest was Daggett.

 I found a high point for the main T (Elephant Mountain) and on Google maps the road looked good. Well, Google maps doesn’t tell you everything. Most of the road was good except for a reasonably short rocky section. The good news is that the road became paved the rest of the way to the top. The bad news was the road was steep, tilted, had a sheer cliff to one side, and had a few deep pot holes. The good news was it had a wonderful view. T1 was placed here running 4 watts into an 11-element beam pointed at the starting point.

I wanted to try some of my unusual antennas out on some of the Ts. T4 was just a 50mWinto a dipole hidden at the north east corner of the Peggy Sue’s Diner. Later a couple of motor homes set up camp next to the T. I wondered what that did to the radiation pattern.

T8 was the “bug” T. I was surprised at how well the signal covered the valley.

T3 was a 1/2 watt into a double folder dipole that looks like the stand for serving pizzas. Unfortunately, T3 suffered a double failure. The battery went dead and the antenna came part so it had poor radiation until it had none.

T10 was 50mW into a bow-tie antenna. The radiation pattern seemed poor.

T11 was 50mW into a hex beam. T11 could be heard in many places.



Results:

Team			T1	T11	T10	T4	T8	T3
N6MI / AF6O		3:15	4:16	5:00	5:38	?	DNF**
Winner		        109	117	127	136	144

			T1	T4	T8
N6AIN			2:14	3:34	4:10
			150.2	154	160

			T1	T4
KA6TAS / KF6GQ	        3:16	4:15
			162	167

Mike*			T4
			5:38
			0
* Mike was from the motorhome in front of T4.
** The transmitter was DNF (did not finish) not the hunter.