Drove through sense smoke from two fires to get to Kings for my coffee and muffin. Arrived at the start to find no signal. First report by cellphone indicated that it was horizontal, but that got corrected by 10:10 but still no signal. I finally resorted to raising the antenna to 13 ft, turned off everything including my wristwatch to reduce noise cranked in the 200 Hz filter of SSB and found a weak CW (IDing T9) to the north (350). It eventually got stronger as the hider(s) were increasing power while others were hearing things. I also heard another signal with very dirty CW iding T1, that was about 20 degrees further east (12) from T9. Some of the starters split to the end of the road and when they returned they said there was some signal down there. Others went to the church parking lot and they too said there was signal there.

I went to the church parking lot and lo and behold, the direction to T9 wasn't north at all but SE (129). Couldn't hear T1 up there. I thunk on this and decided that the transmitters were somewhere that could bounce off of the mountains (now mostly on fire) to the north and yet not bounce off of the mountains to the east. 129 degrees would do this fine. Now just how fare down this line would he be. Not highup (wrong thunk) as the signal was still weak even at 129 degrees, but weakder on the bounce from the north., so I suspoected he was fairly close, say 50-75 miles. (another bad thunk).

Off I went out the 91 to the east, no signal at Green River, south on the 15 and no signal until almost Temecula. Kept going to Poway when I found my flux gate on the mast was not making sense with the mast handle and went in to a recalibration. The handle was off 90 degrees and the FG was off 30 degrees. Got everything settled down and went east to Romona an got waylayed by DeLorme into thinking that Romona Oaks went through and ran into TNJ/TQQ with the same problem. They left, going to Julian, but I never saw them again. I went to Julian and on south to lake Cayamaca. After a brief visit on the wrong road, I got on the road to Mt. Laguna and continued to where the signal was so strong that my teeth hurt. I spent the next couple hours romping up and down all the little dirt roads off of Pine Creek Road without ever going to the top of the Mt. as no one would hide on top of Laguna.

It was now dark and I talked to Marlene on the phone and the local fires were getting much worse with now 200 homes in San Bernardino burned and new fires all over the place being set by some looney, so I decided to head for home.

The way home was to go through Laguna and on down the Mtn to the south and get on Hwy. 8 and on into San Diego. I announced that I was going home but as I went through Laguna I had 100 dB of attenuation and couldn't leave now. I found T9 at the top of Mt. Laguna running 130 watts into an 11 el or so pointed at the start. I didn't try to find the 18 other transmitters hidden with in foot walking of T9 as I still needed to get home and it was dark and it was getting cold and it was .... so I went home.

I think I will further rub Joes Moell's nose in it as finding 18 transmitters, running 20% duty all on the same frequency, all running at the same time and under the umbrella of 130 watts erasing any front end within a quarter mile, in the dark is somewhat harder than finding 5 transmitters that are nice enough to take turns at transmitting and are easily visually spotted in the daylight.

Jippy