05 May FCARC Spring Stay-at-Home Fox Hunt, 5/9/2020
FAYETTE COUNTY AMATEUR RADIO CLUB
SPRING STAY-AT-HOME FOX HUNT
Saturday, May 9th 8-9am
This weekend is the CQ Worldwide Foxhunting Weekend (May 9-10, 2020). We’re going to try something different and do a fox hunt as a club, from the comfort of your home QTH. More details forthcoming, but here’s the concept:
1. A VHF fox within Fayette County will begin to beacon starting at 0800 on Saturday, May 9th. Frequency to be announced later. Note – the fox will NOT be at The Ridge Nature Area.
2. KI4ASK will conduct a fox hunt net on the 521 repeater at 0800 to officially kick off the fox hunt.
3. Each participant will take a bearing to the direction of the strongest signal emanating from the fox. It is recommended to use a directional antenna, such as a Yagi, to get the strongest signal. If you don’t have a Yagi, there are some alternate means of direction finding – http://www.homingin.com/equipment.html.
4. Each participant will log their bearing into software (details forthcoming) so that everyone can see all of the bearings online and triangulate.
5. As a club, everyone will attempt to find the fox based on the bearings taken from their house. This is a group effort.
6. Coordination will be done on the 521 repeater.
7. Once the club is satisfied the fox is located, then I will beacon the location of the fox via APRS using my callsign KI4ASK-7 using this link – https://aprs.fi/KI4ASK-7
More details about the software we’ll use coming later. Here’s a refresher about how fox hunting works – https://kk4gq.org/pdf/FoxHunting101-ARDF-KI4ASK-April-2019.pdf
There’s only one rule:
Do NOT attempt to drive to the fox. We are only triangulating bearings to the fox, not doing close-in work to find it. You must operate at your home QTH or within a 1/4 mile (if you want to find high ground).
Hope you’ll roll out of bed Saturday morning and join the fun!
73,
Joe Domaleski, KI4ASK