First Foxhunting Adventure: Finding the W1MJ v2 Fox!

Having missed a couple of the recent hunts due to busy weekends plans, I was excited to get the chance to search for a hunt that ran into the middle of the week and was also a bit closer than most. Armed with my tape measure yagi, my KC9ON attenuator and an Explorer QRZ-1 handheld (a radio that is just about as cheap as a Baofeng but does have a working stength indicator — so I wouldn’t have to worry about dropping it in mud or bouncing it off a rock, not knowing quite what I may encounter), I set out.

The W1MJ fox had been hidden on in the Beaver Brook North Reservation — a nice conservation area on the edges of Waltham and Belmont. I parked at the playground area near the Waltham side and began listening. I quickly heard the fox (a 4 watt Baofeng-powered fox). With each message, I took a quick scan with the yagi to attempt to find the strongest direction, then would walk down the trails in that direction and listen again.

I quickly found that with a 4 watt fox, the attenuator was almost immediately needed to keep the signal strength from overhwhelming the attenna. Eventually, I made it to an area where no amount of attenuation adjustment would limit the signal. Even without an antenna, my handheld was getting full signal. I tried adding the attenuator without the Yagi, but this still received too much signal most of the time, and using the body fade method on the whole apparatus was less than ideal, with very inconsistent results.

After a bit of searching around trees and stumps, I called it a day, happy to have gotten close on my first attempt.

I sent a note to W1MJ thanking him for the hunt, and he responded suggesting a few tricks to try to get a better direction that close up, if I wanted to try again — One was to tune slightly off frequency. Another was to try the third harmonic to find a weaker signal to use.

A couple days later, I had time again to go back to the site. Having previously found the high activity spot, I left the yagi behind and just brought my handheld. Tuning off frequency didn’t help much, as my radio seems to have a fairly wide open receive… but the third harmonic worked quite well! As soon as I approached the area I’d been hunting the squelch opened on the third harmonic and from there I was able to use the body fade method to find a location to head. Just around a corner and behind a tree I spotted the fox, well camoflauged! Success!

Good fun and great excuse to spend some time outside putting some technical and sleuthing skills to work. Thanks again, W1MJ!