10/12/96

Saturday, 10-12-96 turned out to be perfect weather for our fox hunt.
Joe Marrah KB8LFQ had the honors of hiding, and Clint (KC8EHR),
Mark (N8DEF), Don (W8BQD), and John (AA8LF) were the hounds.
The hunt started from Lake Lansing Park (south) at 10:40 am. Joe took the biz of
hiding with some seriousness, and proceeded to turn the fox on as he drove
around the other side
of lake Lansing while we were demonstrating dfing.
The result was that we thought he was hidden and ready, and knew he
was close because we heard him on 2nd harmonic.
A quick call on the 539 proved otherwise, but I still had it in the back
of my mind that he was close in, even though my bearings showed otherwise.
Twenty minutes passed and Joe gave us the green light to start and the hunt was on
.

Like many hunts before, the fox was barely audible at the start, even with
a 4 element quad. Joe was considerate enough to ask us if we could hear it ,
and elevated the antenna so it could get out better. Minutes passed,

half hours passed, hours passed, days passed?
Joe got lonely and hungry, and frankly, it serves him right for not bringing doughnuts :-)
Joe was hidden in River Bend park, south of Lansing. From our starting point
some of my bearings took me directly through Holt, AA8lf drove into to the
Grand River park which connects to Riverbend park through several miles of
trails, but decided the signal was not strong enough to go it on foot. (fortunately)
(Everybody commented that ALL of the parks had their rest rooms locked, this is no
small problem for a fox hunter :-) Rather hard to believe considering this is the
most beautiful time of the year to be outside. Not long after aa8lf left this
park, Don and Clint showed up and also decided the fox was not there.
(and that the rest rooms were locked).
Some time around 2:00 AA8lf pulled into River Bend park and was hot on the trail.
I found it quite disconcerting that Joe saw me as soon as I got out of my car and
commented on my quad being
the strangest looking rack he'd seen today.
I of course couldn't see him. Fortunately he didn't have a camcorder. After 20 minutes of
fumbling around with my quad, attenuator, df tube, and ht's, I was first to find
the fox, as well as the first to chastise Joe for not bring doughnuts.
Mark called in that he'd had a lot of fun hunting but had run out of time.
Don and Clint followed about 30 minutes later and once arriving
at the site had little trouble finding the fox. AA8LF declared himself the winner,
having 5 miles less than Don and Clint, but it should be mentioned that
Don and Clint doubled back to Don's house after the hunt started to pick
up a protractor, so when you compensate for that, the mileages were about equal.
One thing that did add to the time factor was that Joe stretched the 10 mile radius a bit
:-) I spent a lot of
extra time looking in closer, but I guess in the spirit of contesting I can forgive
Joe, not sure about the lack of doughnuts :-) I had one other thought to help speed up
future hunts, and that would be to either run the fox continuously, or change its timer to
run more frequently. I found a lot of extra time was spent waiting for the fox to transmit.
Then the repeater went off the air completely.
As we have no remote control of the repeater this came as quite a surprise.
I checked with Jim Harvey and apparently it was
the tubes in the repeater and it was unrelated to the jamming. Strange coincidence
that this happened the day before the LCDRA/CMARC swap held at a new location.
Fortunately Jim was able to get the repeater back up in time to use it for the swap talk in.
73 de AA8LF

 ps, I purchased an 8 element long boom quagi (15') for 2 meters. It
has a half power beam width of .00005 degrees, and as soon as I figure
out a way to mount it on my car it will be one heck of directional
fox hunting antenna :-)

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