KC8LPZ

2010 Foxhunting Season Starts Next Month

The Motor City Radio Club fox hunting season is coming up, I'm a bit excited. Fox hunting can be a fun little bit of something different. Basically, the "fox" is a group (in our case, whoever won the last fox hunt) that takes a transmitter and transmits one minute at a time, spaced one minute apart, from a anywhere the rules allow. The rest of the groups start out and look for them, using directional antennas. The fox is limited nearly any place within 30 miles (air distance) from the Wyandotte Repeater (147.24+). Not a terribly complex thing really, but fun nonetheless. The idea is to get there with the most direct route possible - time isn't important, generally.

One of the kind of neat things is that it's not terribly vital to have the fanciest equipment, either. I was in the winning group once in 2009, and we were using Bruce (KD8JTZ)'s 2 meter HT he picked up for $20, and his homemade 3 element yagi he made for (if I remember right) less than $10. It's more about patience than latest and greatest radio equipment. For example, we partly won because at the end, we thought they were either at the end of a dead-end dirt road, or further down the road we were already on. If we went down the dirt road (maybe a mile, mile and a half long), it's a couple of miles added to our distance, which can easily be the difference between first place and the end. It was a gamble, but technically for the club's rules, the distance counted is what the car drove, walking doesn't get included. So we walked there to check.

Maybe I'll do an "Intro to Fox Hunting" blog post sometime, but for the moment there's some good material out there. A couple are homingin.com and this page on qsl.net.