I want to congratulate Doug on a great hide. We got snookered early on. went up the 5 freeway to the secret underpass 14 miles before the pyramid off-ramp, and with preamp on in usb, we could hear nothing! So we did a 180 and headed back to the 128 westbound. Right away we heard a signal up pass Lake Piru, kept going west till Filmore, in which we got a strong signal up towards the Condor Sanctuary. As we got to the base of the trip up, we had a full scale signal pointing up! Up we went, no signal! We got to the top, and the only signals we got were weak bounces off the local peaks. As we were going down, we met N6AIN & Ray N6EKS, told them there wasn't any thing up there, so since we where still in the T-hunt mode, they didn't believe us, and continued up. We decided to follow them back up to the top, and see if they found anything we didn't. They didn't! We went back to 128 and we turned right (west) and Deryl and Ray went left. We were heading to Reyes Peak to get a better bearing, and if lucky find the T up there. We went up about a third of the way and heard nothing! What is this? We could hear signals at times down in the canyons, and nothing up here? What is going on? So as we got back down to hwy 33 we met up with Deryl & Ray again. This time we both decided it was time to compare notes. Deryl says they could actually actually hear two T's at the Mutau Rd. just off the Lakewood valley Rd. As we went toward that point, we got many T signals, but they didn't make much sense. Sometimes in back of us, sometimes into the side of a canyon wall! When we actually got to the turnoff, we got two T's aimed at Mt. Pinos! Now we now got some really good help! N6ZHZ who was up on Alamo Mt. was getting three T's @ 270 degrees. This put it down in the Thorne Flats area. I convinced Steve that the signals we could hear from Pinos where just bounces, and we had to go down into the Thorne meadows area. Many years ago I hid a transmitter down at Halfmoon campground, using a beam pointed up at Frazer Mt., where I had the main T to get the hunters to the area. I was only running a couple of mw. into the beam, so the signal was only heard up at the top of the mountain. So I knew that the area was way down below the ridges that were around that area. This was why we couldn't hear anything from the beginning of the road. As we crested the top of Johnson ridge all hell broke loose! We could not only hear T1, but several others also! After that it was just a matter of time to locate the rest of the T's (about 3 hours). I think Doug did an excellent job of setting up this hide, it was frustrating, but we did have a lot of fun doing it. Got home about 12:00 midnight, and Steve about 45 minutes later. Boy! were we tired or what!

Don KF6GQ

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