More New Hams + Yamhill Foxhunt

All three of them took their exams in Vancouver the previous Saturday. They made quite the splash, with a 7, 9, and 11 year-old seated at tables (or, later, running around doing a victory dance!) scattered throughout the hall where the test was administered by the CCARC VE group.

With two of their sisters and AD7UF, these three started off their radio "career" right with a nice fox hunt! We joined Dale, WB6BYU, down in McMinnville, where he had hidden three transmitters around town. After helping get the other drivers set up with mobile directional antennas, Dale led us straight to the park where one of the transmitters was hidden, so the kids could get a head start on the more exciting aspect of RDF (radio direction finding) for a kid: running like mad through the trails and foilage, waving an antenna around. The breeze was a bit nippy, but it was dry, and we had a great time. Dale's little "blue box" receivers designed specifically for 2m RDF made finding the fox easy as pie.

(While looking for the blue boxes on the Internet, I came across this 2005 QST article by Dale on building an 80m finder. An interesting advantage of using the 40x longer wavelength is that it doesn't reflect off every little building or object!)

Dale puts on a monthly hunt in Yamhill county, and has trained many people all over the Portland area on various aspects of RDF. He offered to come up and help with a fox hunt in Cowlitz County if there's enough interest!

From McMinnville the group went straight to the CARS annual dinner meeting, held this year in Gladstone. Food, prizes, running around, more food, more prizes, what was this meeting supposed to be for? Oh yeah, electing club officers, summarizing the year, all of that stuff. Good times.