"Mark James Boyd" wrote in message
news:3fbe65f2$1@darkstar...

I was once doing a briefing with a US Army helicopter
squadron in Tenessee when this little old guy
with some weird handheld antenna walks in
and starts poking around. He didn't say anything,
and we watched him for a minute, and then
he stopped in front of a closet and asked
"can someone open this please." We opened it
and he pulled out an ELT that someone had
"dropped" into the closet.

Many years ago, I had access to one of those handheld gizmos before the
local CAP was able to purchase their own. Twice they asked me to go out
with them to find ELTs that were obviously not on an airfield and apparently
not associated with any airplane crash. One turned out to be a brand new
EPIRB in the showroom of a marine electronics place. The second one was
another EPIRB that had actually been involved in a marine "save" and the
owners had put new batteries it not knowing that the seawater-activated
switch needed to be replaced at the factory. Both had been activated for
several days before we arrived.

I was also involved in another "find" at PBI that was driving the FAA
to distraction. A strong signal would appear on the ground control channel
for hours at a time. It turned out to be on the Sheriff's patrol car that
prowled the grounds. It had an aircraft radio installed and it was
transmitting continuously whenever the ignition was on. The officer said he
was wondering why he hadn't heard anything on the radio for days. The
always-on red "transmit" light on the radio never aroused anybody's
curiosity.

Vaughn