Those of you who have been dying to have a Fox Hunt can get your chance at the 9th annual US National ARDF championships scheduled to be held in Massachusetts, June 5 - 7, 2009. The hunt will take place at the Blue Hills Reservation which has 7,000 acres of hunting space permeated with 125 miles of trails. There are two different hunts scheduled; a 2 meter hunt on Saturday and an 80m hunt on Sunday. Details can be found here.

What is a Fox Hunt? It's simple enough in concept, a little more difficult to execute however, especially in traffic. FARA owns a neat little package that contains a 2m transceiver, batteries, and a box full of control circuitry. Maybe we should be organizing a practice hunt or two, at least on 2m. 80m hunting is a whole different matter and requires somewhat larger DFing antennae.  Somebody hides the package somewhere in town. You find the package using radio direction finding techniques. What techniques? They can be as simple as using your body to shield the antenna on your HT so you can find a null in the signal from the Fox; or as complex as a phase shift detector with multiple antennas. In any case, when you find the null, the Fox is in the opposite direction. Why a null and not a peak? Simple, a null is usually deeper and more pronounced than a peak, especially with omni-directional antennas.

The FARA Fox will even bark for you if you tune to 146.565 simplex, key your rig and press the # key on your keypad for a second or so. The fox will respond with about 60 seconds worth of CW that reads:

FOX, followed by 50 seconds worth of beeps, and finally K1RK, whereupon it goes silent again.

The FARA Fox should now be healthy once again and rar'n to go; he says, find me if you can, but we need a hider and some finders who want to try it!

Tally Ho, gang,

, WX1K