There are some FARA members who are really dying to have a fox hunt. The problem is that a good hunt requires hunters. The fox hunt is another one of those skill sharpening activities that can really come in handy if we have more than a handful of people who know how to use them. Ever heard malicious or noise interference on our repeater? If we had enough members with fox hunting skills, tracking these down might be quite a bit easier. If you would like to see what this is all about, contact John, WX1K or Henry, K1WCC. and let them know you would be interested in a hunt.

What is a Fox Hunt? It's simple enough in concept, a little more difficult to execute however, especially in Falmouth summer traffic. We have a neat little package that contains a 2m transceiver, batteries, and a box full of control circuitry. 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 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!

Tally Ho, gang,

, WX1K