We get this message in a bottle with only two lines of text, “Help!” and some characters “4V FH 246 677”.
The challenge description indicates that we’re looking for a location, so we need to figure out how that weird code translates to a location.
Searching for the system
The first thing we try is just googling the code, just in case it ends up revealing a location. In our case, it apparently is similar to some home depot product number, so this step is not very useful in this case.
With the first attempt futile, we know we’re looking for some sort of coordinate or location, so we need to think of different ways to look up what we’re trying to find. Trying various searches will eventually lead to one that shows you MGRS, a grid based coordinate system, hey, that matches the challenge title!
Converting MGRS to a location
Converting the MGRS square into coordinates gives the lat, long 56.53712, -156.97382 which we can put into Google Maps. When we zoom in, we can clearly see that the message was written at Foggy Cape.