Greg, W6BAF and I went through our list of possible hide sites on Friday and decided that the pedestrian overpass on Cuyamaca St. at Mission Creek Dr. which just happened to be adjacent to Town Center Park East would be a fairly short and easy hunt. We arrived at the location and picked out locations for 4 micro T's. The main T would be a Kenwood F6-A HT using my 3-Ele. beam set up for hunting. We had a change of hunters when Tom, K6VCR cancelled at the last minute. However when I called Joe KE6PHB at 4:55 he reported that Greg, KI6RXX had showed up unexpectedly so we had 4 teams participating, Joe, KE6PHB & Bill, W6ZM, Robert, N9SCD & Giry, AK2I, Greg, KI6RXX and for the very first time a new team, Tim, AJ6XP and Ben, KN6VFW. Tim has been coming out as a ride along for over a year and Ben has been out before so it was not a totally new experience except Tim had finally got his vehicle set up for hunting. Testing confirmed that 0.05 W signal on "economical low" could not be heard at the college so we had to bump it up to 0.5 W with the antenna pointed at Rattlesnake Mt. for them to hear the signal.
Hunt started at 5:05 and we pulled up the APRS screen to see how everyone was doing. For some reason N9SCD was not beaconing? Turned out he had a new phone and had not entered the APRS data correctly so we had no idea where he was heading. Tim got a bad reflection for him and a good one for us as he was leaving the college and headed south on 125 which ended up with him being stuck a ways south of the transmitter for quite awhile. Joe and Greg were heading out west on 52 and made a life saving turn onto Mast heading our way. We watched them circle around the park area for awhile and then walk into our location to find T-1. The search began for the 4 micro T's with KE6PHB and W6ZM finding all 4 first at around 6:10 with KI6RXX a close second. N9SCD and AK2I arrived and located all 4 around 6:40 followed by AJ6XP and KN6VFW checking in at 6:53.
Everyone packed up and relocated to Oggi's where a few hunters had the unusual experience of getting a pizza with no cheese!
73's & Merry Christmas to everyone.
See some of you at the County-Wide on December 30th.?
Joe N6SZO & Greg W6BAF
