Brainerd Area Amateur Radio Club 
Fox Hunt and Meeting
August 25, 2001

    The Brainerd Area Amateur Radio Club held it's Annual Fox Hunt and Summer Picnic on Saturday, August 25th at Loren Thompson Memorial Park in Baxter. 

	The Fox Hunt ran from 10:00 AM to 12 Noon. The frequency was 146.45 MHz simplex. All participants started at picnic area. The first place winning team of Paula WØHA and Mark WØMH Persons is shown on the left with Paula's new PT Cruiser car.  They ran a pipe through the car's sunroof to hold a four element Yagi antenna.   This antenna was a part of a club project to build fox hunt and general purpose 2 meter antennas.  The winning time was 1 hour and 5 minutes.
	Coming in a close second was Terry May KIØFW wit a time of 1hour and 8 minutes.  Terry used a home made two element antenna.      In third place was John Luce WØJGY with a time of 1 hour and 18 minutes.  John had to leave early before the photos were taken.
	The Fox was Club President Al Doree WØRC.  Al set up near the intersection of Wise Road and Beaver Dam Road about 4 1/2 miles northeast of picnic site.  His antenna was just 2 feet off the ground.  He talked and ran CW for 30 seconds every 5 minutes.  To confuse the contestants even more, he changed between 1 watt of transmit power and 0.1 watt a few times.
	Bob Feuer WØZPE provided the appetizers.  They consisted of Linguica and Cabellero sausage which he had flown in from his former home town of San Luis Obisbo, California.   The city is often called "Slo Town."
	Some of the participants as they gathered for lunch.  It was a great day for a fox hunt and picnic.
	Marv Holms WØYHE brought by an HF rig and antenna.  He contacted a station in Sweden via CW on 15 meters before the bands went dead.

How the Fox Hunt was Won.. by Mark Persons WØMH
    For the second year in a row, Paula WØHA and I were lucky enough to find the fox transmitter first.  This was in spite of the fact that our home made four element Yagi antenna was horizontally polarized rather than vertically polarized.  That was because I accidentally drilled mounting holes in the wrong side of the antenna boom.  There is about a 9 DB gain penalty when a receive antenna is cross-polarized with a transmit signal.  Regardless, at 10 AM, Paula and I could not hear the fox in the start area so we drove about a half mile north and then picked up a weak signal.  It looked like it was coming from northeast of us.  We drove to and parked in the Valvoline Oil Change parking lot just south of Highway 210 on the west side of Brainerd.  A crowd of oil change grease monkeys gathered around to see what we were doing.  It was good advertising for the club.  This is a relatively high spot and gave us a better opportunity to home in on the fox signal.  We found the best signal was from the north so we proceeded up Riverside Drive to another high spot near the intersection of Beaver Dam Road.  From there, it looked like the best signal was from the northwest.  We drove up Beaver Dam Road and out to Highway 371 north.  In the process, we drove right by the fox without seeing him.  From Highway 371, it looked like the signal was coming from behind us.  So, we doubled back to an area east of Mills Motors and came across Terry KIØFW who was also hot on the trail.  At one point, we saw a parked van that looked very much like Al WØRC's, but that turned out to be wrong.  Terry stopped to take a bearing on the fox.  We passed him up and proceeded to an intersection ahead where we stopped to take our next bearing.  It was the intersection of Wise Road and Beaver Dam Road.  Well...there was Al...the fox himself.  GOTCHA.  Terry was close behind to take second place.  

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