This episode is a documentary of the 2006 US ARDF Championships held
near Raleigh, NC. Formerly released only on a paid DVD, Gary, KN4AQ, he
has just released it as Ham Radio Now episode 134:
http://arvideonews.com/hrn/
While free to watch, he does appreciate donations that help him to
continue producing these types of programs.
Since at least Jay and I have the DVD, this might be the program that
was presented many years ago at an SBARC meeting.
Amateur radio transmitter hunting is typically a competition. There’s a
scheduled start time, people gather on foot or in vehicles, the fox goes
on the air and the hounds are off!
This sharpens people’s skills in a competitive environment, but the
knowledge they gain is limited to their own experience. Techniques
learned are guarded as secret tricks of the trade to be used against the
competition on the next hunt.
Locating the source of a signal has applications other than fun
competition. Tracking down interference, hunting an ELT or EPIRB,
isolating a spur or noise source all require some knowledge of direction
finding. Working in parallel, these problems are solved faster than in
a competitive environment and everyone participating gets some knowledge.
With that principle in mind, I’ve begun to conduct an experiment. This
is based on the adventures of WB6JPI [1] and others[2].
Let the (non-competitive) games begin!
There’s a hidden transmitter somewhere in the Santa Barbara area. It’s
on the T-hunt frequency of 146.565 and transmits for four seconds about
once a minute. Every tenth transmission is 20 seconds in length and
includes CW identification. It runs 24/7 so feel free to listen,
observe, and hunt at any time.
Collaboration is encouraged. Negative reports such as “Can’t hear it
from my QTH” are useful as well as reports that you’ve heard it.
Discuss your ideas, signal strength, bearings, etc. on the various local
nets as appropriate, as well as on the SBARC mailing list. When you
decide to venture out to find it, take others with you as part of a
divide-and-conquer strategy.
With the transmitter is a logbook. Enter your name, date and time, and
callsign if any. Take a picture and send it to wb6rdv(a)sbarc.org. After
people have had a good opportunity to locate the transmitter we’ll move
it to a new location and let the fun start all over again.
[1] http://www.thunter.org/geothunt/
[2] http://home.comcast.net/~foxbw/site/?/page/FOXRADIO/
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Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay(a)impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
