Don KF6GQ and Steve KD6LAJ's Story
Oct 22 All Day T-Hunt

Put on by Ron WA6CYY

Steve and I arrived early (9:00am) at the Summit Inn start location. We surveyed  the site of the old Burned down Summit Inn location from on top of the mesa. It looks like they are waiting for starting funds to begin construction on the Inn. When this will happen, who knows?

Five teams showed up at the start (it must have been the promise of a BBQ at the end of the hunt!

AF6O Jim was there with Tom VCR I guess this was the mystery guest Tom had promised.

As 10:00am rolled around we all heard something, we guessed it was the hidden T, because 5KHZ up where two stations that covered any FM signal that was being sent by Ron. It was necessary to go to SSB in order to copy anything that resembled a T-Hunt signal. As we and the others checked our bearings, we found that we go anywhere from 14 degrees to 90 degrees for bearings. We KD6LAJ and KF6GQ got multiple bearings on what we thought was two T's, Jippy said that they thought they heard 4-5 T's! Well, since all the other hunters where getting north easterly bearings, including us, we incorrectly decided to go up the 15 toward Barstow and beyond if necessary. As we traveled up the 15, there was no signals that pointed in any one particular direction than any other. We got off at Stoddard Wells road. At this point we got one very strong signal (relativity speaking) pointing North up the 15! This was good, a place to aim for. As soon as we got back on the 15, we soon lost all excitement, for all the signals we could hear was again all over the place. We continued north until we got to Hodge Rd exit. I felt we needed to get as high as possible to see if we could get anything definitive as a direction to continue to. We climbed up a ATV trail to this spot that was maybe 200' above the surrounding land. We sat up there for several minutes not hearing anything different than we been getting. Then all of a sudden a very strong signal on FM that was about 130 degrees, and we could hear two different sihnals at the same bearing! Looking at our paper map, we decided that the shortest distance on that bearing would be to follow the main trail / road to hwy 247 to Lucerne Valley. This starts of being Hodges Rd, and ends up being Lucerne Valley cutoff Rd. Stoddard Wells Rd. is mixed in there somewere. Well off we go on a good desert road that has had some grading in most places, but then as we went through a off road staging area with 452 rigs and trucks plus kids running crazy through the area, Steve promptly got off the main road onto some cow trails. We had our GPS on and knew where we wanted to go, but saw no readily available trails to get us there, so cross country we went 4X4 ing it! We found what we thought was the main road, but it also turned out to be a shortcut through a mountain pass, in a windy sand wash through a small canyon. Then saw power lines that we could identify on the GPS, so off in that direction we went. To make a long story short, we finally found the Lucerne Valley cutoff road that we had been looking for. Not as we crested the ridge the T's came in stronger than at any time before and we could discontinue using SSB! We had a good 140 degree bearing, which placed it at several possible spots across Johnson Valley. As we reached the valley floor the signals began doing their thing again, we had any bearing that you could want, 0 degrees 45 degrees 180 degrees, al those in between! We decided to continue on our last strong bearing of about 140 degrees, and kept making turns that kept us on 140 degrees. We ot back to hwy 247 at Camp Rock Rd. and headed east. As we went east the bearing kept turning north, when we got to Bessemer Mine Rd. we went on it heading north. I asked Steve to call Deryl and see if they have had any luck. It turns out, they also were on Bessemer Mine Rd. but from the north going south! We told them that we had bearings heading north, and they said that their signal was strong and heading south! Wow! This means that the signal was somewhere in between us! As we continued on, our signal started to turn right back on the 140 degree bearing we had before. This is not good, that means we still have lots of miles to go. So off we went across the desert on more sandy roads towards the signal we hoped. After going about 30-40 minutes on dirt roads and not seeming to get any closer to the signal, we then againg decided to head for hwy 247. When we got to 247, and could go 60-70 mph, we started to see the signal start to increase in strength and maintain the same relative bearing  as before. We got as far as the town of Landers (the place where extraterrestrials land periodically), at Linn Rd. One of the T's was straight down Linn road, and the other was over Steves right shoulder (SW), we went for the one to the right. This was the T singing and chirps. We where the first to sign in, wow, that means the others must have had a worse time than we did! Now to find the close encounters one. We went back to Linn Rd. and drove straight down till we heard a third T with voice. Since we knew it must be weaker than the others and must be close. We arrived at the Intergratron location. This is a site where the operators said machine talk to extraterrestrials. They had a larg group attending a event at this time. The T was found on fence post behind the monument explaining the building. Of we went to find BBQ T. it was located SW of the Intergraton by about 1.5 miles. Ron WA6CYY was there with his BBQ ready to go. We were the first to sign in to this one also. He told us there was on more T that had lost it's ID and timer and was on continuously. We decided to to head for that one before returning to BBQ. This T was located at the north end of Giant Rock airport, up on a small ridge. I have to ask Steve to forgive me for the slight bump we encountered on the way to this T. It was large enough to empty all the contents of my map box in the rear storage compartment to the back seat of the car! Steve sprained his right hand and lost his cell phone from his pocket into the floor area of the car. That's the first time I actually bottomed out all my suspension going over a bump! I noticed today that my car now seems to have an unexplained rattle coming from one of the doors, and the passenger side window doesn't work. I'm surprised that the crash bags didn't deploy. Well to sum up the hunt, it was frustrating as usual, got some 4X4 wheeling in, the weather was nice, and got to see places we need to use on and up coming hide. Thanks Ron for hunt and BBQ.

Don KF6GQ