The mid-summer HARC Foxhunt this year took place on an utterly-splendid Thursday 10th July evening. I was ensconced at the pre-selected transmit lair by 1915 hrs, with a quick equipment check transmission into GB3WS to confirm signal emission, and ready for a first transmission at 30 minutes past the hour.

Assembling at the starting point of Manning’s Heath Village Green were Lone Ranger Robin G3OGP & Shotgun riders Paul G4TMC & Alister G3ZBU, Jon M0TWM & Lucy, Martin M0MHC & Valerie. Adrian G4LRP was indisposed, but still monitored the hunt from his shack and we chatted on WhatsApp between transmissions.

The first transmission commenced at 1930 hrs, with a brief pause for a sanity check with participants to confirm initial copy. I kicked off with some introductory spiel about the weather and some tantalisingly vague clues about my surroundings which could have described about 98% of rural locations in Horsham.

I set about making my transmissions on the 10 min / 2 min schedule. Functionally, I’m trying to provide a transmission with a steady cadence and an even vocalisation to yield a useful signal to sweep through, as the hunters wave antennas and listen (or monitor S meters). I also like to impart a bit of useful or informative content, so I prepare a script to base transmissions on.

Topics this time included a newly-learned technique for throwing a hoisting line up and over a tree branch for getting /P antennas some height; Palindromic Prime Numbers, Rattlegram and COFDM, Sainsbury’s Sun-Dried Tomatoes in Oil with Oregano, of which I found a jar under the passenger seat while looking for the pen I dropped during a transmission; base-36 encoding of digits & the alphabet.

I had also brought with me a copy of Spycatcher and the ARRL Antenna Handbook, both aging tomes but eminently suitable for reading extracts as fox transmission material, but somehow I managed to occupy 2 minutes with multiple impromptu departures and did not need to rely on MI5 or League references for filler.

I provided clues on several successive overs – a couple were bounding ones – references to specific roads; a comment on how long it might take for a hunter to get to me from the start; the direct distance from start to lair; and I also dropped in some clues referring back to the base-36 encoding scheme which I’d described earlier, although I misjudged how difficult these clues would be to figure out on the fly for most hunters.

Consequently, for the 2050 hrs transmission, with no hunters yet in sight, I decided to get a bit more obvious. I made a comment about there being no clouds in the sky, and that this would have been Ominous (a Warning) as rain would really have put a cap (a Lid) on things, alluding to the nearby village of Warninglid just North of me.

I learned later though that most hunters had opened the envelope and bee-lined to the Half Moon already.

My last transmission at 2100 hrs gave the lair away. As I was starting to wrap up the station, mere minutes later, Paul and Alister, not having heard the 2100 hrs transmission, drew up alongside me, envelope unopened. Hence, they were the first, last and only hunters to have completed and therefore have the honour of fox duties on the next occasion.

The after-hunt meetup in the Half Moon was a very pleasant social, and we were there chatting outdoors until well after 2200 hrs. Thanks to all the participants & to Adrian for taking an active interest despite his confinement to barracks.

EPILOGUE

The lair was a hair over 5 km from the starting point, in line with a tip from Adrian on keeping it close due to being an evening hunt.

In writing up the foxhunt, I realised that, while I’d looked at hey whats that website to get a point-to-point indication of copiability from the lair to the starting point at Manning’s Heath, and looked at surrounding topography, (which I thought would provide in-again / out-again copy depending on where hunters chose to stop for successive bearings), I hadn’t looked at a model of spatial coverage on radio mobile online.

So, better late than never, I’ve just run a model.

It transpires that the lair I picked, a parking spot in the haplessly-named Spronkett’s Lane Park, is in fact a respectable candidate for a regional repeater site.