It's not what you don't know that gets you, its what you know that aint so.

That prettty much sums up our all day experience this time out. Last week my kids and I were getting things together for the fullerton hunt. The laptop had not been used in a long time and had the wrong software loaded. Since it has no CD drive, I finally loaded the new DeLorme Topo software through the parallel port.

It turned out that my older son and his friends had plans for the weekend, my friends had other plans, but my 11 year old son David really, really wanted to go on an all day hunt. So it was just he and I on an all day. Usually we have so many people on the team that there are not enough jobs for everyone to do and he gets left with no job to do. This time we had to set up to do it essentially alone.

At the start we could not hear the first T. Some other hunters gave us the bearing they got at the start to get us started, and I heard other hunters talking about being able to hear the first T down at the reservoir. We went down there and we were able to hear the T and confirm the bearing on the T. So far so good. We plot the bearing and get bearings to San Diego and off we go.

We headed off down the 405 and the bearings are the same as at the start. We hit the 5 and continued south. We lost the T as we bligthly drive past El Toro and on past San Juan Capistrano. No worries, I expect to pick it up again by San Clemente.

When we got to the vista point by Camp Pendleton, we could not get anything toward the southeast. David picked up a T to the northeast, but I was unconvinced. So we continued south and tuned east on Hwy 76 toward Escondido because 'Dad is always right'.

By the time we got to Vista, I was getting worried over not hearing anything at all and started climbing hills. The only T we could hear was to the north. Beginning to think we'd been had, we headed north on I-15 and old 395 taking bearings along the way. We got conflicting bearings until we got to Temecula. There we climbed a hill and settled in to finally figure things out. I was totally confused. While David took off to explore the top of the hill, I finally settled down enough to figure out what was wrong. It turned out that the Topo software default was to plot in degrees magnetic while all the bearings I was taking were true. The previous software install we had changed the default bearing plot to true and I never checked it. Finally, things started to make sense and David has an 'I told you so' to use from now on. From there we heard only 3 T's: T4, T2, and the 'crickets' with a voice ID.

After dinner to get myself calmed back down we settled down to hunt. We tracked down T2 after dark and found that we were the second team there, but we had over 200 miles by then. From there we could no longer hear the 'crickets' and went back to Temecula to hear it and finally tracked it down as T7.

It was near midnight when we got to the bottom of the hill at T7. On the road at the bottom of the hill we knew we were close and got out to sniff. The T was so strong that the s-meter on the HT was pinned no matter what direction we pointed. We looked for the 3rd harmonic and got completely random directions. Adding the attenuator did no good as the s-meter remained pegged. Disconnecting the antenna from the HT gave us no signal at all. I finally disconnected the antenna from the attenuator leaving the coax attached to the HT which gave me the ability to hunt on body shielding. That way we climbed all the way to the top of the hill where we finally found the T and (to my shagrin) the road to get there and realised that we forgot the odo reading to put on the sign in sheet. I left David at the T, climbed back down, radioed the odo reading to David who filled in the sign in sheet, and drove back up the hill to get him.

Then back down to Temecula to hear T4 again. Then we hunted down T4 finally arriving at 4AM.

So we found all the T's we heard. I don't know what happened to the rest of them - whether we did not hear them because of the direction we came into the 'hunt field' or the batteries died before we got near enough to where they could have beed heard. No matter. We had a good time. We found everything we heard, and left feeling successful no matter what. No complaints.

To the hiders, thanks for a good hunt no matter how poorly we did.
Leonard Jensen, KA6KZZ David Jensen, KG6CBD