What a beautiful Day   

Glenn, AB6PA picked me up at home in his RAV4 about 9:AM. We loaded about half of the stuff I own  and we headed to the Pathfinder start point. Very crowded but we chatted with all and I set up my nest in the passenger seat.  We had heard two weak CW signals at my house before we left but when we got to the start nothing could be heard. Suddenly a loud voice signal came on with a bearing at Baldy. It was saying “T-BBQ KF6GQ”.

 To explain our mental position at this time (justifying the very dumb decisions I will make in the next few hours) consider the following:

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This is Memorial Day week-end.

 Don, (KF6GQ) had earlier proposed that this would be a Bar-B-Que hunt with dinner served at the last to be found “bar-b-q transmitter.” This was cancelled when it was found that only three teams were going hunting.

 But four teams showed up

 Don and family always camp out on long weekends.

 The two CW transmitters we heard at my house in Fontana pointed at 330T degrees and were weak like at Gorman.

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First bad decision:

The dinner is back on since we have 4 hunters 

Second bad decision:

We will find the Two or more other transmitters first so we can end at the BBQ T. 

We went east on the 60 Freeway son hearing the same CW transmitters and they were distinctly east of the BBQ voice T that we were now ignoring. We continued to get bearings off of Gordonio that got us east and eventually into the Badlands on the 60. In Beaumont we decided that we had passed the Ts and went west on the 10. The CW signals were much stronger here and we went on up the 210 eventually went past everything and headed up Cajon Pass on the 15. The signals had pointed North all along the 210 and, guess what: 

Bad decision number 6 

They must be up somewhere between the 15 and Waterman in the San Bernardino Mountains. So up Cleghorn we went with 40 miles of dirt ending up on 138 near Lake Silverwood. They are not even a little bit of up there. Nor are they anywhere North of up here. So we took 138 back to the 15 south to where we could hear something and off the 15 in  Devore and wiggled around there with no using attenuation. The voice BBQ T was up Bailey Canyon. 

While we romped up Bailey canyon, we heard another voice T (two in fact), one saying “watch out for the snake” and the other saying “watch out for the snake”. We stopped at the computer voice one and took lots of bearings. 

Here is where things got kinda messy. Glenn packed off with my Blue-Box sniffer but no radio, but soon returned with the sign in sheet (He had forgot to take the mileage with him up the hill). I stayed at the car and tried to get my handheld radio to work with Glenn’s sniffer which I finally did. He took the sign in sheet back up the hill and returned with a couple cookies. We thought he had found the computerized snake T. 

We searched for the BBQ T which was very strong at the Snake T, but couldn’t find it. After considerable worry, we concluded that we had found the BBQ T with the cookies and not the snake T. Remember Glenn had no audio when he was finding it, just the Blue Box tones. We went back and after staring at the same bush for a half hour or so  we concluded that that Altoid Can with a rubber duck was a snake. 

We took a bunch of bearings on the voice snake T and concluded that it was SE of here and all the CW things we heard were SW so we went SW. We really tried to get to LAJ T8 which we determined was in the river bed and came close from the North but when we went around and from the South it died and Steve personally did a stand-in role acting like a T8. We found him but it was after dark and we went home. 

A hunt of many many mistakes…

 

Bob/Glenn, WB6JPI/AB6PA