Good Afternoon,

This is KD6QAH reporting.

As most of you know, I have been searching for a couple of months for what I determined to be a malicious interference jamming device.Right off the bat, I had my suspicions, you know, the usual suspects.

I had been busting Sanchez’s balls about it for weeks and claimed total innocence. To his credit, he never wavered his story.

I had been T hunting only a few times at that point and had been chasing a no tone carrier west of the mountain, and some kind of weird signal east of it.  It was very hard to pin point exactly where they were coming from as they were very intermittent. It was obvious to me that they were being controlled.

Shortly after, a third distinct problem started on the repeater. It seemed that the weaker stations were being filtered out periodically.Even the stronger stations had a weird static on them. Honestly, I must admit, at first, I thought it was Alan and his cohorts with a third device.I apologize for that mistake as it turned out to be a repeater on 2 meters on Contractors that was de-sensing the 435 machine.

The night that Buzz and CDX made that discovery, I talked to Sanchez on that repeater. I accused him of setting up jamming devices.He laughed and stated that we were stupid because it was the other repeater interfering with 435.  I stated that it was obvious that what he said was true but the other two signals were definitely malicious, and I thought he or his buddies were responsible.I told him that if I was to ask around that I could probably find someone that would say he was jamming the repeater.

This is important,

He said that he “HAD” told people this but was lying to them to see who was leaking information.

He then said that he understood why people would think that and that’s life in the big city, pretty much.  I told him I would keep looking, and he said there was nothing to look for.  Now, for the last few weeks, JSP has been yelling at me that I will never find it. He said that if I told him what kind of radio it was if I found it he could verify if it was Alan’s.

How can he verify something that doesn’t exist!!?

Big mouth Desert Doug has to chime in every day and call me an idiot and bet me $500.00 that I couldn’t find it by the end of August. Well, I honestly thought I would be paying him, it was a hard hunt and these guys are good. This morning…….I got lucky.

At approx. 0330 this morning I was talking with Angus on the K6GE repeater. I noticed while duplexing, that we were being jammed. It was an intermittent, no tone type carrier that would reset the repeater while were talking. It was relentless. It was malicious, just as it has been for months. I could not verify the signal as I was in Huntington Beach and could not see it on the input.

I went home and dialed in my tape measure yagi in hopes the jamming persisted. Gary, K6GE and myself had planned on leaving his house at 05:30 to go to the repeater site and adjust the priority input antennas. We decided to go to breakfast at Carl’s Jr. off the 14 freeway and San Fernando road. As we approached, I got a full scale no tone signal on the input. We stopped immediately about a block from Carl’s Jr. and started to T hunt. It didn’t take long.

It was buried in the bushes on the east side of Carl’s Jr. next to the drive thru line.  I am not a radio genius, that’s for sure, so I will describe the best that I can what Gary and I found.

It looks to be a simple concept. It is an ammo box with a rubber duck adapted to the top. It had a solar panel powering the gel cell battery inside. It was buried so the antenna and solar panel was exposed. He has a Yaesu HT connected to the gel cell. He had some kind of controller running the radio which someone told me should be controlled by DTMF, which makes sense.

The frequency was set to 146.395 with no PL tone. That’s all it was. Very nicely done. I was very impresses how simple it was.

The best part was the note to Gary. It said . . .

Initially I laughed about it.  Gary wasn’t stoked, but I reminded him that it really could be anybody. Maybe he was framed.  Yea right.  Remember, there is another one out there, so lets all keep looking.

KD6QAH