The July foxhunt occurred as scheduled on 12 July, in a brief respite between monsoons. There were only two foxhunting teams available for this contest what with people decompressing after participation in the Three Rivers Festival parade the day before, replacing the brakes on their van, putting the finishing touches on their Ark, brewing up 55 gallon drums of DEET, and so forth. The two teams available to participate were that of Kim & Jim Machamer, KB9’s DOT & DOS, and the team of Carole & Al Burke, WB9’s RUS & SSE.
The role of the fox was provided by Charles Ward, KC9MUT, Fred Gengnagle, KC9EZP and Robert Dean, KC9UHU, commonly referred to within the foxhunting community as “The Devious Ones”, (for good reason). They hid out at a City of New Haven Park Department facility several blocks from Charles’s QTH near an out-of-service Parks Department swimming pool. They chose this spot in somewhat of a panic after having to abandon two other previously planned hide locations because those sites were under water. They employed the usual high-power fox plus a microprocessor enabled micro-fox which burped out about 200 mw of cw on 146.580 MHz.
Now, the Ward-Gengnagle-Dean crew outdid themselves in camouflaging that microfox. They put it inside an aluminum duplex service box, you know, the kind you routinely find in outside locations that are meant for waterproof service. The thing had a standard duplex recepticale installed so you couldn’t see the microfox inside. The microfox’s antenna extended down into about a 6″ length of standard plastic conduit with a stake on its lower end that was shoved into the ground. They installed it alongside several other electrical outlets grouped around a fence post so that the thing looked like it had been there for years. Absolutely devious!!
