People have been doing radio direction finding as a sport for decades. I learned a lot from weekend transmitter hunts - we'd have one team hide somewhere in the general vicinity of the city (had to be heard from the starting point), transmit a signal on the 2 meter band, and the rest of the teams would hunt them down.
Sometimes it would be a tiny unattended transmitter. One of our favorite tricks was to bury the whole thing and use a 1/4 wave brass rod as an antenna, and insert it into a dry weed in a vac
Its official name is "Radio Direction Finding", but goes by several nicknames like "foxhunting", "transmitter hunting", or "t-hunting".
The "home base" of RDF information is the "Homing In" website at http://members.aol.com/homingin/
The author of that site has written a very good book explaining various techniques and containing plans for building various kinds of directional antennas.
Most T-Hunters are amateur radio operators (http://www.arrl.org), but that's not a requirement, since you aren't transmitting anything while hunting.
It's great fun. Use the ARRL website to search for any Amateur Radio clubs in your area and go to a meeting (usually boring, but some have good presentations) and ask about T-hunting in your area. If nobody knows, poke around and see if anyone there has done it in the past and is interested in starting it up again. Usually all it takes is knowledge that someone else is interested to get the whole group going.
Our local radio club did a foxhunt sometime last year.
Antennas ranged from simple yagis, phased paper clips on a yardstick connected with coax, a mailing tube and aluminum foil, one guy even had his hand held radio inside a metal trash can. Most were homebrew, but some were commercially built.
It's pretty easy to do, actually. Some people used bi-directional antennas, rotated them until they could no longer hear the signal, and then went off to either of the null directions. Others used highly-direc
That's nothing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes it would be a tiny unattended transmitter. One of our favorite tricks was to bury the whole thing and use a 1/4 wave brass rod as an antenna, and insert it into a dry weed in a vac
Re:That's nothing... (Score:0)
Re:That's nothing... (Score:5, Interesting)
The "home base" of RDF information is the "Homing In" website at http://members.aol.com/homingin/
The author of that site has written a very good book explaining various techniques and containing plans for building various kinds of directional antennas.
Most T-Hunters are amateur radio operators (http://www.arrl.org), but that's not a requirement, since you aren't transmitting anything while hunting.
It's great fun. Use the ARRL website to search for any Amateur Radio clubs in your area and go to a meeting (usually boring, but some have good presentations) and ask about T-hunting in your area. If nobody knows, poke around and see if anyone there has done it in the past and is interested in starting it up again. Usually all it takes is knowledge that someone else is interested to get the whole group going.
Re:That's nothing... (Score:1)
Antennas ranged from simple yagis, phased paper clips on a yardstick connected with coax, a mailing tube and aluminum foil, one guy even had his hand held radio inside a metal trash can. Most were homebrew, but some were commercially built.
It's pretty easy to do, actually. Some people used bi-directional antennas, rotated them until they could no longer hear the signal, and then went off to either of the null directions. Others used highly-direc
Re:That's nothing... (Score:1)