Bristol County Repeater Association Foxhunt #4. Two Words: Failure.
As usual AA1F and I would head down to the southeastern corner of Massachusetts to play a road rally (for all you motorheads!) style game of hide-and-seek with radios. This amateur radio direction finding event, colloquially called “foxhunting”, will have us driving in circles inside a 10-mile radius for 5 hours. Our primary goal is always to make it in time to check in on the Bristol County repeater by 10am. We did not make it. Our second goal was to find the 5W boopin’ beepin’ radio transmitter (i.e., the “fox”). We did not find it. The 3rd goal was to find the SECOND boopin’ beepin’ radio transmitter (i.e., the “fox #2”!) We did not even get a chance to look for it.
This is the fourth ARDF event that the Bristol County Repeater Association has hosted thanks to Skip KB1CNB. This time we stopped by Derek AK1WI’s pad to pick up a homebrew 2M yagi to use alongside our commercial Arrow yagi. I used the AK1WI special with a Yaesu FT-4X for this event. Our other equipment consisted of 2 magmount antennas on the roof, a Baofeng UV-5R, a Radioddity GD77, a laptop computer, and a handheld hiking GPS unit.
These hunts always lead us to weird places…
We decided to focus on a single signal and ended up plotting a map of RF headings that looked like this:
The smiley face shows where the first transmitter was located. You can see how close we were to it. In fact, we both knew it was on this little peninsula. The problem? The area was ENTIRELY residential! And we could not see a way that the fox would be hidden in someone’s yard. (Shhhh….not to give away the plot…but it was!) We drove out of Massachusetts and through Rhode Island trying to see if the signal was not actually on this Swansea peninsula, but across Mt. Hope Bay back in Fall River. We did learn that Bristol, Rhode Island is pretty… And furthermore, we did confirm that nope, the fox was really back in Swansea. But by then, believe it or not, our time was up. We never found the first fox, much less had time to listen to the second.
Once our partner (see here!) and now our competitor, Jeff AC1JR and this time his wife were also playing. They found both foxes. In fact, AC1JR let me know that the biggest clue that was given happened over the repeater. It was announced that one of the foxes was indeed hidden in someone’s yard. This is what their map looked like, complete with the location of both transmitters (X marks the spot!). The one labeled “25” was the one we were looking for.
So, we came out a bit carsick, dizzy, our heads buzzing with RF beeps, and a bit frustrated. That said, we cannot wait for the next one! The AK1WI antenna worked flawlessly and he has already improved his design from copper wire elements to arrows. I know that I want to invest in a full duplex handheld so I can monitor two stations at once. I need to learn how to program the Radioddity GD77 by hand on the fly too, if I actually want to be able to use it in the field.
But most importantly? I learned that the fox is not always at the donut shop!
As always,
KM1NDY