FFA story from KF6GQ / KD6LAJ

Part 1. The restaurant.

First, I Don must apologize for the scene at the evening dinner. I'm a type 1 diabetic. On our way back from picking up our transmitters, my car started to act funny, it wasn't shifting correctly, by the time we got to the parking lot, I had a lot on my mind. I took my insulin as I normally do before eating, and went in to order dinner. There I found out that we would all order dinner at the same time, so we could all eat together, I needed to get food as soon as possible, so I went to look for a waiter or waitress, I wasn't successful in finding one. I then found one and made a scene with her and left the restaurant, Steve, who has seen me this way before, went out with me. My plan was to get a snack out in the car. Having done that, I needed to find out what was wrong with my car. Steve discovered that I was low on transmission fluid. He went over to the Union station to get fluid. By the time he got back and we put it in the car, and I had recovered sufficiently enough, time was running out. I had promised Steve that I would get him back to Corona by 7:30 at the latest. Here it is 6:45 or so I told Steve to tell everyone that we where leaving.

Part 2 what happen before we got to the restaurant.

I just finished putting together my PicoDopp ARDF unit this week, so I wanted to test it out. I knew before I started, that we would be at a disadvantage with the low power squawk box type hidden T's. I took a beam with me if the Doppler should fail completely, but wouldn't use it in the hunt. We hid out east of Temecula just north of Vail Lake on Oak Mt. This area is fast becoming a housing development. Next time we hide out here, it is going to be much harder finding spots that are not in somebody's front yard. Last time we hid this far out, we had several N6IDF's T's to find on the way in, but this year we didn't. Everybody else hid their T's close to Temecula or in the mountains just west of the town. So we didn't find our first T until after 12 noon. I used a separate radio to receive the signals directly from an omni antenna. This proved to be less than perfect! I was getting about 2/3 full scale noise from all the mapping and computers being used in the car. In fact on some signals, we got bearings on the Doppler that we didn't hear at all on the omni receiver. So we just drove around the different roads until we came upon a signal that we could hear and identify. Most of the time the Doppler did a good job of getting a direction from the car. Then used the sniffer to sniff out the signal. Also I didn't have my earphones to use with the sniffer, so it was a little harder to determine what signal I should be hunting. Several times we got up to a high spot to get some directional information on several signals. I think considering the number of signals, and the power levels used, we didn't do too bad. In fact we found one T that no one else had found. This was only because we went down a dead end road that had no discernable signal on it, till we came to the end. At that point the Doppler picked it up and led us to the hanging T. So many of the roads and locations where very much like the last hide we did in Temecula. All that was different, was some of the open fields that had been used last time, now have homes on them. All in all, we had a great time on the hunt, I wish we had more of them.
Don KF6GQ