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 :-)
Rabbit hunt
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