My Experience in the MSRDF Fox Hunt March 13, 2021
Don Loper, N5SPJ
The day’s hunt began with the sign in and logging of mileage on Saturday morning by 9:15 am. The process began much earlier in the week for the day’s hunt. I was definitely not as prepared as I should have been, but we arrived with not a lot of extra time to spare and got signed in and received our instructions for the hunt. I chose a myriad of antennas I had on hand, none of them being a 2M antenna. The antennas I took with me were in the 700 – 800 MHz range. They were Yagi’s so I would obtain the directivity, but with them being well out of the operation range we were hunting for helped to attenuate the signal since I did not have an attenuator of any type. My arsenal included an SDR dongle and a couple of handhelds. I had one handheld attached to a magnetic antenna on the top of the car, and I started playing with the different antennas which included a military surplus antenna marked “Confidential” that was supposed to be highly directional. After trying a couple of the antennas, I settled on one that gave me a relatively decent signal and had good directionality. Not knowing how well my equipment all worked together and not having tested the antennas with it could have worked against me more than it did, however we headed off in the first general direction after the “Hounds” were released. Trying to keep our mileage down we went in a general direction, took another reading and headed off again, only to find that this direction was misleading. We backtracked and got back on the correct general path to the Fox. As we got close the Fox had to relocate because of several vehicles parking near him and obscuring his location even more. I believe that we were getting several readings that were mis-leading because it appeared the signal was bouncing. I switched to my handheld later in the hunt and continued homing in on the Fox with it. One thing I would have liked to have had was a radio or receiver with an analog meter. The digital ones indicate a change by lighting multiple segments at a time to indicate a rise or turning off a group of segments at a time indicating a fall in the signal, the analog meter would have given a more gradual change making it easier to see the changes. The last time I had to locate a transmitter, it was for my work and I utilized my service monitor as the receiver and it has an analog meter on it making it much easier to see changes in the signal levels.
By this time our Fox (K1REZ) had become sleepy and his transmissions were farther apart. Actually, the first finders had arrived and distracted him. We made one more reading and headed in his direction making us the last to arrive. But fear not, even though we were the last to arrive, after the mileage was tallied we were actually in third place.
When planning to participate in one of these events, find a known transmitter, this could be a friend’s station, a National Weather Service transmitter, ATIS system at the airport or other known source with continuous or frequent transmissions. Take your equipment and make several tests and see how your equipment interacts with each other and how well the directionality of your antenna is. Move to several different locations and take readings and check that against your known location of the transmitter you are testing with. All of these things will help hone your hunting skills and help you to know your equipment and how all the pieces interact with each other better. One last thing is a good map or mapping system to plot your readings onto. This would have helped immensely had we had one covering the area with us.
- Don Loper, N5SPJ