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NARRATOR: If you enjoyed hide and seek as a kid there is one hobby that may be just right for you. Transmitter hunting is an adult game of hide and seek which uses the same technology utilized for animal tracking, aircraft recovery and lo-jack systems. Don Lewis is a longtime transmitter hunter in the Southern California area.
DON: Transmitter hunting is part of amateur radio. Someone hides a transmitter at a local park, downtown LA, out at the beach, or as in our all day transmitter hunts it can be a couple states away. As a hunter you’re at the start point, you hear the signal. You get a bearing on it. You plot the bearing on a map or in a computer now, we all have GPS mapping software.
And you plot that bearing and figure which roads are the roads that you would travel –mostly freeways you would travel - to get to the next point where you’re going to be able to pick up a signal that’ll give you better information to get to the hidden transmitter. Generally our rules state that we’re not allowed to go out to Catalina Island or any place outside the continental USA. The longest transmitter hunt that I did go on was up into Utah. St. George Utah is where the transmitter was located.
When we start these transmitter hunts all we have is a signal that starts at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning and we find the direction it’s at. We have no idea of how far away it is. Our object is to get to that transmitter with the minimum amount of mileage put on our car for that morning.
We pass through some rather interesting areas. Mountains in the way, canyons in the way, rivers, private property and things like that that we have a tendency to run into and have to circumnavigate around. Might last from a couple hours to possibly all day, all night and into the next day. You do put on a lot of miles and now that gasoline prices are a lot higher we’re hiding them generally in closer.
We usually have a companion we go with and this particular person is generally while you’re hunting is called a ‘naviguesser’. Not a navigator, but a naviguesser because he is always guessing where we should be going. One of us just sticks to the driving. He reads the maps and tells me I should make a turn and all. We also bounce signals off of mountains. You’ll take and you’ll aim your antenna at a mountain and bounce the signal off a mountain and they hear the signal from the mountain and not from where you’re located and they have to drive - even though you know, you might know it’s a bounce – you still have to drive almost to the mountain before you can get a signal going back to where its actually coming from.
So that’s a typical trick to use. But as you approach the transmitter the signal is now starting to get stronger, you’re now having to look at individual little roads, dirt roads, roads that may or may not go anywhere. And if you ever see sign on a road that says maintained by a jeep club you know what that means is they don’t maintain it.
When you get a ‘you are there’ signal we usually get out of the vehicle if we haven’t spotted the antenna transmitter at this point which in many cases it’s hidden in brush , trees, behind a boulder or something. We get out what we call a sniffer, which is a handheld device. We sniff till we find the transmitter and at that point we sign into a sign-in-sheet with our time and mileage.
So you have to find all the transmitters and have the least miles. There is no time element involved, we don’t want to have a speed factor involved. We want to keep everything as safe as possible. I do this because it gets me out. It gets me outdoors, it gets me going on an adventure. In fact, I’ll be hiding one next week, but I’ll not tell you where I’m hiding because then I’ll have to shoot you.
CAPTIONS BY JASEN LEWIS