Jippy’s Story
Free-For-All
This note describes some of
the tricks I used for hiding transmitters for a FFA and how I hunt transmitters
in a FFA. It is not your usual stuff found in the T-hunt books and other
places.
Hiding:
Realize that there will be a
lot of transmitters on at the same time. Not just a few sharing a frequency but
a din of background noise caused by a fair number of transmitters that are
always on at the same time. This requires a different mode of hunting, but also
allows some interesting forms of hiding.
I hid 9 transmitters in the
same place (within a 50 ft circle) that all sounded identical. They were one 2
watt AF6O box iding T9 with some tones and 8 squawkboxes using recordings of
this T9. Everything was set to transmit every 30 sec but not quite so there was
no noticeable pattern. One was never found and one broke so there were 7 in the
hunt.
This led to some interesting
effects. Most of the hunters arrived at the transmitter laden cul-de-sac and
found two or three and concluded that that was it and left. You cannot get a
count, it is just noise. Later they all came back and found the rest, but by
then they had figured it out and were mostly searching for the physical units
and signin sheets and not sniffing.
Three of my transmitters had
changing patterns. One had two “voices” using random CW tones and random code
speed, and one had five “voices” with changing code speed and tone, but not
random. Both of these used the same ID throughout. One changed ID every 20 minutes,
from T10 to T11, to T12 and repeat. A couple folk found this transmitter more
than once but were too embarrassed to sign in twice.
Due to the scoring, it is
important that your transmitter be found. But if they are too easy, then
everyone will find them all and you will again lose. Note that I hid 11
transmitters in this hunt and everyone found 10 so all that only gave me one
point. I could have gotten the one point by hiding one transmitter. Mine were
too easy. Bob his 4 transmitters but
only one was found. He only got one point, his were too hard. Realize his hide
wasn’t too hard but his unfound transmitters were too weak to be discriminated
from the noise and never found. They would have been found in a 4 transmitter
hunt. So the techniques for hiding are tricky and require some thought.
Hunting:
Hunting in a FFA is unique.
There is always more than one transmitter on at any one time and often so many
it is just noise. You cannot identify any single one unless you can remove most
of the rest, so to find a transmitter you must do something other than swing
you beam around.
I find that to add attenuator
until the transmitters are reduced to two or three and work on them now that
you can single them out to get bearings. This works well for the strong
transmitters and you can find about 4-5 of them this way. To find the weak ones
you have to move to where they are. Since you have no bearings you drive to the
likely spots and try to get geometry to make the weak ones the strong ones so
you can isolate them. This is not as impossible as it sounds as all of the
transmitters are hidden with in one hour of the restaurant, so the most you
have is about a 15 mile radius to cover.
We all did this drive around
thing covering at least 5 miles in all directions and 10-15 miles in logical
directions and never heard Bob’s three transmitters.
This was a great hunt of this
type and offered some interesting problems. Note that over the years the FFAs
are being won by the same folk. There is a lot of unique skill being developed.