On 3/9/14 6:43 PM, Levi C. Maaia wrote:

Jay,

Can you send details for those of us for which this is new? I have DF gear from Marvin but I don’t know which frequency this transmitter is on.

Absolutely! It's on 146.565 MHz. It transmits for four seconds every minute except every tenth transmission is 20 seconds long including my callsign at the end.

If you have a GPS or NTP-synced clock or a WWV receiver, as of now it comes on about 44 seconds after each minute, but this can and will drift over time.

Here's the full story:

A collaborative transmitter hunt in Santa Barbara:

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@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/

-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV