Welcome to the Hucknall Rolls-Royce ARC Fox Hunting pages.
Our 2009 Season is underway. The hunts start at 7:30pm local time and take part on the first Thursday of each month beginning in April and the last hunt in October (7 hunts in total).
This season we have opted for simple equipment only hunts, to allow all who want to try this exiting aspect of the hobby without the expense of buying or building high tech equipment.
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Mobile Fox Hunting (Mobile-ARDF) is usually a team sport. A few prefer to hunt alone, but in most cases there are two in the car which constitutes the team.
The navigator keeps track of incoming signal directions on a map, trying to be as accurate as possible even when whizzing along in the car. He or she plots bearings on paper maps or a GPS-augmented computer and attempts to predict where the transmitter is and how to get there. This allows the driver to safely concentrate on the vehicle and the roads.
At the start of a 2-meter mobile Fox Hunt you will see a wide variety of RDF equipment, much of it home-built. A simple hand-held radio and tape measure Yagi beam are the weapons of choice these days.
Vehicle mounted Yagis and quads were common place a few years back, the mast usually protruding through the roof of a vehicle. There was usually a hole of one or two inches diameter in the sunroof or roof, with provisions for weatherproofing. This allows maximum boom length without overhang and make's it easy for either driver or navigator to turn it. A simple setup with such a beam would be an RF attenuator for closing in and a receiver with S meter, inexpensive and surprisingly effective.
A few teams have and still do employ Doppler RDF sets, sometimes linked to a mapping laptop. Doppler's can catch and hold the direction of short-duration signals and are advantageous when bearings change direction quickly as the team closes in. This high-tech approach is fun to use but is expensive, has a big sensitivity penalty due to lack of gain in the antenna system and can suffer badly due to reflections. where hidden transmitters have weak signals the Yagi/quad hunters defeat the Doppler hunters as often as not.
