The Foxhunt Chronicles
The second foxhunt of the 2013 FWRC’s foxhunt season occurred on Sunday, the 3rd of March on a sunny but cold March afternoon. In general good foxhunting weather albeit a little nippy.
The March hunters included the team of Jim & Annie Pliett, K9OMA & KA9YYI plus Carole & Al Burke, WB9’s RUS & SSE, the team of Charles Ward & Fred Gengnagle, KC9MUT & KC9EZP, the team of Linda & Steve Nardin, W9’s LAN & SAN plus their grandson Alex, and the team of Kim & Jim Machamer, KB9’s DOS & DOT,…. In all a total of eleven rabid hunters just chomping at the bit to find their elusive prey.
And serving as the prey for this contest were Bob Dean, KC9UHU & Dave Spence, KB9VTK who were holed-up at a baseball diamond at Harlan Community Park. They had erected a yagi driven by about 50 watts of rf for the high power fox signal, and hid a microcontroller controlled “microfox” within a brass bell located on the baseball diamond property as the actual fox. The microfox was programmed to automatically produce about 50 milliwatts of cw on the fox output frequency for one minute every five minutes. For this hunt the fox frequency was set to 146.31 MHz which is the input frequency for the FWRC’s 146.91/.31 repeater, and thus allowed area hams to listen in on the progress of the hunt via the 146.91/.31 machine.
Continue reading →