It was a hot and steamy night….
Okay.  It was a hot and humid Friday evening when Bob N6ZHZ and I (Cathy KD6CYG) went out to get a bearing on N6MI’s hidden transmitters.  We went to the Pathfinder start point.  Nothing.  After calling various people and finally hearing from the hider, it was suggested that we point our beam towards Japan.
 
We didn’t have a world map.  However, we were given a generalized bearing of 330°,  so we might be lucky to get a Mt. Fuji bounce.  Perhaps a Hiroshima bounce.

We drove up the 210.  Suddenly, near Mountain Ave. we heard the extremely weak signal!  Just long enough to get a sketchy bearing of 292°.  Then the signal vanished.  Following this dubious trail, we took the 210 to the 134, to the 170, where at the 118 we again got one brief blip of a signal and a rough bearing of 40°.  Then, the signal was gone.  By this time it was 11 pm and we had to return home to feed the cats.  Traffic and road construction were horrendous, and several times we were re-routed, such as down the 2 south (really needed gas and found the most expensive station this side of Japan).  Construction at the 210 tunnel in Pasadena routed us on surface streets eventually back to the east.  It was like that until we got home at 12:58 am.

Bright eyed and rarin’ to go, we left the house at 9 am on Saturday, got cheap gas, and headed out on our bearing to Russia/Japan/Santa Clarita.  10 hours later we’d finally found one of the two T’s and the other one had died.  Our map was in tatters, our nerves were frayed after a very near accident in a roundabout which had no connecting road in the direction we needed to go.  We’d passed Vasquez Rocks four times and gotten on and off Via Princessa six times.  Déjà vu.  We had gone up to Escondido Canyon and Crown Valley, Aliso Canyon, back down Soledad Canyon (Did somebody from San Diego Co. name these roads?) and out to N2, over to Gorman, through Hungry Valley, back down the I-5 to the exit right before Magic Mountain, where we nearly had the accident and the ice chest dumped its by now very liquid contents on our map case and all over the back floor of the truck.  From there we cut back across to the 14 Fwy, deciding it would be faster to go home that way than plow through 80 miles of 15 mph Valley traffic. 
Doing so, we got the signal again, and couldn’t resist the siren’s call – eventually finding CYY & RJN and a clue that eventually led us down the right path to the main T.  Enough said.  The rest can be told in photographs.  We need a new map.
N6ZHZ & KD6CYG