Foxhunting With a Twist

Over the past several weeks I have been participating to QRP Foxhunting on Sundays and Mondays. The idea is to find low power QRP stations and “shoot them” by making a QSO. This is a friendly event among QRP enthusiasts in EU. The master of ceremonies is Jos, ON6WJ and he coordinates the EUQRPFOX mailing list and the website. Every now and then foxes and hunters are given special themes such as straight keys, vintage rigs, and most recently stealth antennas.

If you are interested about this activity, please join us by participating the weekly hunts and by subscribe to euqrpfox reflector by following the link below.
Join reflector (mailinglist).
You can find more information from EUQRPFOX website, link below.
EU QRP Foxhunt website
The following is the description of my hunt during the past weekend.

Foxhunting with 92cm magnetic loop

Mission: 60 minutes, foxes on the loose, band 20m, QRP 5 watts, stealth antenna.

My home QTH is full of antennas and squeezing yet another antenna seems to be a very difficult task. To avoid antenna coupling I decided to go mobile and run the KX3 from dedicated battery. I charged the battery overnight so it was ready to go on Sunday morning. I did some map searching about possible high places in near vicinity of my home QTH, but could not figure anything that would have the access route on the right side of the hill and have a short drive by car. And I definitely did not want the hill between myself and all the foxes. Instead for opting a high place I decided to drive to a nearby lake. There is a parking lot next to the lake and cross country skiing tracks leaving to all directions so the place should provide good takeoff to EU. The parking lot is on the north side of the lake, so that should favor the southbound and south west antenna directions even further. Google maps. Lake Ruotasjärvi. View towards south. I checked everything in my home QTH before finally packing the antenna to the van. When I got to the lake I quickly took the antenna from the van, connected the coax to the loop, and hoisted it up to 4 meters. I tied the rod to the mirror of the Vito for keeping it upright. The capacitor provides reasonably accurate and very fast tuning with the tuning rod. Within few seconds I was able to put loop into SWR 1.0, measured with KX3 and 1 watt. Then it was time to go back inside the car and put the earphones on and find the foxes. My first reaction was “Oh sh*t!” There was massive contest splatter all over the bands. But hey, foxhunting is not for fainthearted! I started scanning the bands and by luck I found Zoli (HA2PP) hiding a bit above 14,056. Unfortunately he was in and out from the QSB plus terribly in QRM from contest stations. So, I made a mark for this frequency and continued scanning. What made the scanning process especially cumbersome was the very narrow bandwidth of the loop. The practical < 2 SWR was less than 7kHz so I had to retune the antenna every now and then while going up and down the 20m band. Unfortunately, I could not find anyone else so I decided to wait and see if band conditions would improve and I could work the fox station. And then just like a miracle a strong signal came calling CQ EUQRPFOX just a bit below Zoli. My antenna was already tuned for the frequency so I had a little room to maneuver. With help of KX3 I quickly zero-beated to the fox who was calling CQ. I gave my call twice, and yes, Andy (SP9NLI) came back. I think he was as surprised as I was. He was real S5, and coming loud and clear. We quickly exchanged the reports and antenna information. That QSO really made my day! The remaining time I continued waiting for Zoli. There was strong S9++ contest station exactly on the same QRG, I tried to get his attention in between the CQ robot calling test. However, despite my official fox hunting gloves, I could not give a successful shot at this fox. After the foxhunt, I went to 17m, retuned the antenna and called CQ for few minutes. A couple of stations came back. At this time I was getting a bit cold already despite the beautiful sunshine coming inside the van so I decided to call it a day. Finally I snapped some pictures to my archives. Beautiful weather and very nice field trip on Sunday!

Best 72s and Happy Hunting!