July fox hides under log

The Foxhunt Chronicles

The sixth foxhunt of the 2013 FWRC’s foxhunt season occurred on Sunday, the 14th of July as planned. The July hunters consisted of the team of Steve & Linda Nardin, W9’s SAN and LAN plus their grandson Alex, the team of Jim & Kim Machamer, KB9’s DOS and DOT, the team of Charles Ward, KC9MUT and Fred Gengnagel, KC9EZP, and the team of Annie & Jim Pliett, KA9YYI and K9OMA plus Carole & Al Burke, WB9’s RUS and SSE.

Dave Spence, K9NDU and Bob Dean, KC9UHU served as the wily fox. The actual (micro-power) fox was hidden under a log in a nature preserve just off Chapman Rd. near Coldwater Rd. They used a mobile rig feeding a yagi as the high power fox and both the high power fox and the micro-power fox operated on the input to the 146.76 MHz machine so that the local ham community could follow the goings-on of the hunt. Joseph Lawrence, KB9RFZ was also at the Off-Track Betting Parlor starting point trying out some experimental DF equipment, but he did not join in on the hunt proper.

When the high power fox came up at 13:30 the signal was a little weak, but eventually everyone heard it coming from the north, and the race was on.

Our team headed up Lima Rd. until the bearings indicated that the signal was starting to have an easterly bearing, so we turned right on Gump Rd. and headed to the east. The Nardin and Machamer teams continued heading up Lima Rd., and we didn’t see where the Ward/Gengnagel team got off too.

When we got close to Coldwater Rd. the bearing started indicating north again so headed up Coldwater and then started hearing the third harmonic. At that point we were pretty sure that the fox had to be located at a small nature preserve that had served as a foxhunt hiding place in the past.

As it turned out our team was the first to localize the fox, and the first to find the actual micro-fox, thirty minutes after the hunt began. The Nardin crew located the micro-fox one minute later, followed by the Machamer’s thirty three minutes into the hunt, and then by the Ward/Gengnagel crew at forty five minutes. As it turned out, the Nardin crew had 1.2 less miles on their odometer than we did. So by the time-mileage criterion we use for the hunts, the Nardin crew were the winners, and they will be the fox for the August hunt.

As you can imagine, the final scores for this hunt were pretty close together as follows:

And year to date cumulative points are as follows:

In August the fox will operate on the input to the 147.255 MHz machine.