This was a first attempt at getting better hides in a Free-For-All
hunt.Normally we meet for breakfast and at 9:00AM all leave and hide
transmitters that must be on by 10 AM. This usually leads to 20 or so transmitters
allwithin a few miles and all hidden rather poorly due to haste in hiding
4-10 transmitters in an hour.
What this hide tried to do is remove the 1 hour constraint and restrict
the number of transmitters. The rules went as follows: You can hide only
twotransmitters per team. They must be on the air by 10 AM and must be heard
atthe Pathfinder start point. However, you can start anywhere to hunt
theother peoples transmitters.
This not only led to better hides, but the possibility of reducing
thenumber of transmitters to one per team may be feasible. It was a great
hunt.
First, I had two transmitter sites in mind and lit off at 6:30AM to
plant the boogers. The GPS stopped working in the 4Runner. The mapping
program worked, but I had no idea of just where I was. This is a new GPS that
works through the USB port and the software was not recognizing the port.
Next, the "Service Engine" light came on, next the alarm system stopped
working. All this and I wasn't out of the driveway yet.
I put the first transmitter in place in the middle of the burn area
above Upland. They had opened all the gates in the area last fall during the
fires and they were still open last wek. Of course, they locked two of the
gates last Tuesday. I hid the 30 watt vertical polarized two voice
transmitter. T7, under a mess of power lines at about 2500 ft above Upland. There
were two ways in, one up Etawanda and one up Day's Canyon. Deryl found it
at 12:48 and Dave/Melenie at 2:38. Not a big deal.
My second transmitter was on the hill over the Diamond Bar High School on
a hard to find little path through 5 ft high grass you had to drive over
from the rear of the new HS parking lot. It was a AF6O box with a very high
3rd harmonic (for some reason known only to the Screwdriver idiot that built
it (me)). It was found by Deryl at 11:18 and by Dave & company at
1:30.
My hunting went poorly. First I went to see my computer guy
in Montclaire to see if there was anything he could do about the GPS
problem in the car. He had never seen the 4Runner and was duly
impressed. But could do nothing. I chatted with him about stuff for 45
minutes or so and then went after a transmitter, Dave's T1. I carefull
traked to down to the east side of Saddle back with 40 dB of attenuator
and tried to find a way to get up the hill. There is a lot of
construction and such and a lot of the streets are not the same names
and in general I kept getting lost without the GPS and couldn't find
half of the streets that were on the maps and things like that. I know
the "main" route up the mountain (saddleback) was south of where the
transmitter was coming from, but I tried every canyon and every truck
trail I could find working my way south. No way in. Every trail/road
was either private, gone or gated.
At about 2 PM, the GPS started to work and stayed on for the rest of
the hunt. It was off again Sunday morning, however.
By about 3PM I decided to go look at my daughters new house in
Galivian Hills as I was down that way anyhow. Back on the hunt by 4, still looking
to get up that mountain. Talked to Dave on the phone and he said that Deryl
had given up and gone home and no one had found his transmitters and indeed
I had to find a way up there or his hiding would have been for
naught.
I decided that he must have come in from the Orange County
side so I drove around to Silverado canyon and went in there and lo,
the gates were open and I got into the innermost parts of the
mountains. 40 miles of very bad dirt roads later (at around 7PM) I
found Dave's T1 just south of Pleasant Peak Went on to find T2 (which I
never heard until I turned off T1 to bring it out for Dave..just never
listened) at Sierra Peak Both transmitters were these little recording
micro Ts running 50 mW or so with little wire dipole antennas. Even
from atop Sierra, I didn't hear Deryl's transmitters, although it was
past the time and I was too tired to hunt any more anyway.
The road out was Skyline, one of the roads I couldn't find when the GPS
was out and it was right there all the time. I could have had plenty of time
to find Deryl's Ts if I had found it.
It is an amazing thing to have a place right in the middle of LA where
you can drive on tough dirt roads for many hours (I logged around 65 miles
of dirt that day) and it is right there, near everything.