Oh what a night....

[JoeTomasone]

Get a call for a 121.5 Mhz ELT around 11:15pm, and around 12:00 head out to meet my counterpart.  This is the first live mission with the MK4 sniffer, so I'm anxious to give it a go with something besides a trainer. 

The merges are spread pretty well, but in a line that seems to point towards one of our "usual suspect" airports, and one of our ES folks reported hearing a "chirp" on 121.5 not terribly far from there - so the IC squashes my plan to check them out from closest to furthest and instead directs us to hit the suspect airfield.

We don't find it there, and begin covering the merges from East to West.  Around 2am we exhaust those possibilities, and the IC decides to launch an aircraft.  While we are waiting for the aircraft, we decide to take a run by the Eastern merge again since we had that report of a "chirp" and go up more towards where he was going.   Finding nothing there, we decide to head down South to yet another airport as the aircrew has not launched yet.   On the way there, as we are merging from one interstate to another, we spot a car in a ditch just off an exit ramp with hazards on.   So we stop, and find a young woman who was run off the exit ramp by a drunk driver.   She slid sideways off the road and cannot free her car.   She's fine, the car appears to be fine, but she's stuck in soft ground from heavy rain the day before.   She tells us that she's been there an hour and we are the first people to stop and check on her.   Eventually the DOT "Help" vehicle shows up and we get on our way.    Nothing at the southern airport.   The aircraft launches (it's now around 5:30am) and hears a signal at a more northern airport.   We head up there, and 25 minutes later arrive to find NO signal.   The aircraft reports a stronger signal to the Southeast.   We head down there, and as the sun is coming up, we arrive, and can hear no signal.   The aircraft now reports another position -- and there's a small lake, with a sailboat that is leaning over.    SCORE!   We head over there, and discover that the boat is on private property.   The aircraft reports that the signal is definitely coming from the sailboat - it's peaking as they fly over it.    We call the local Sheriff's Department as we cannot get an answer at the door.    Checking Google Maps, we see that this sailboat is on a lake that is barely three times wider than the sailboat is long...  Weird.  Why keep an EPIRB on a boat that can't sail for more than 15 seconds in any direction?   Plus, we're way too close to not be getting anything on 121.5.   The Sheriff's Officer arrives, and we head back  to find that the pond is in a fenced-in pen with COWS wandering around inside it.    SO and the other UDF team member knock on the door while I check for a signal about 100 yards from the boat -- nothing.   Thinking that my Sniffer might be malfunctioning, I grap an L-Per.   STILL nothing.   The other UDF team member returns to tell me that the homeowner is a CAP member, and hilarity ensues.   We apologize for waking her up, assure her that we really DO know what we're doing, and off we go.  The aircraft has landed to refuel, and the other team member suggest hitting yet another airport a few miles away.   We finally get AOS as we head towards the airport -- at 8:45am.   We quickly track it to the airport, and very quickly locate the aircraft in question in a hanger (MK4 Sniffer, how do I love thee?   Let me count the ways... It nailed that ELT cold in 3 minutes from start to finish...).    ELT shut off at 9am on the nose, and a very tired aircrew and completely exhausted ground crew head home.

As it turns out, the aircraft had some wacky problem with their ancient L-Per which had them off by 7 and 12 miles respectively.   

Lessons learned:

1.  Both the merges and the aircraft "positions" each formed a line pointing at that airport.   Need to see if this is common or not, but if they do make such a straight line in the future, it's worth checking out.   

2.  Need to determine what alternate methods aircrews are trained to use in the event that the DF unit in the aircraft goes on the fritz.    We know they had an airband handheld, but did they remove the antenna, or detune it off frequency, etc? 

On the plus side, nothing but high praise for the MK4.  Using a $20 airband antenna from L-Tronics, it got AOS at 3.5 miles from the actual location and nailed it cold in a hanger with 5-6 other aircraft.  I think we were in the hanger for maybe 1 minute before we ID'ed the aircraft.

[SarDragon]

Hey, could you use the return key a few more times? Kool story, otherwise.

[RiverAux]

You can always use the airband radio set at 121.5 and wing shadowing.  Although I haven't done a lot of ELT missions from the aircraft lately, I usually like to have that playing the background over the intercom (at least intermittently) as a backup to the DF unit. 

[BigMojo]

Gotta love the MK4...

Hey Joe, what are you using for an antenna when in the car? I need a better solution than the "scanner" antenna I'm running now.

I had my shortest mission to-date on Saturday. ELT plotted at KFXE, I live 3 miles west of the airport, had AOS when I turned on the sniffer so I took a bearing with the beam and drove there. From the ignition being turned on, to the ELT being shut off: 10min.

[JoeTomasone]

The LVA-1 from L-Tronics.

http://www.ltronics.com/pricing.htm#Antennas


Kissed a lot of frogs before I crowned this one the champ, including another one that was 3x the price.