To passersby, it must have looked like an ATF raid.

Beside vehicles bristling with antennae, about 20 men and women in yellow windbreakers stood chatting in small clusters across an Asheville parking lot. Portable radios were everywhere: pressed against ears, clipped on waistbands and pockets, or held at the ready, one finger on the talk button.
But the quarry was not some slimeball selling hand grenades to drug dealers. It was a fox.

And not your standard woodland creature. This one was a sly comrade sporadically broadcasting snippets of Aesop’s fables - the ones about foxes - and giving veiled clues to his whereabouts.
No one got arrested, either. It was all just for fun.

I was spending a Saturday morning with the Western North Carolina Amateur (“ham”) Radio Society, and was a bit surprised. I’d expected club members to peg the needle on my techno-geek meter, but not only did these folk lack pocket protectors and palm pilots, they were unusually diverse in education and occupation. I met (among others) an ophthalmologist, a horticulturist, a business manager for the Boy Scouts, a bee keeper and a ski instructor.

What glued them together was an interest in radio, fierce devotion to community service, and a near-fraternal camaraderie in which members were generally known as [first name] [call sign]. For example, the fellow who invited me to tag along was Bob WD4CNZ.

The fox hunt game was simple: The fox ran off to hide, then the others, working in teams, drove to a variety of starting places. At a set time, the fox began broadcasting on a prearranged frequency in 45-second bursts every five minutes. The object was to find the fox by using direction finding equipment, plus a map, compass and standard eighth grade protractor.

The process is called triangulation and goes something like this: At the first broadcast, you find the direction of the signal, note the compass bearing, then use the magnetic north marker on the map, the protractor and a little math to plot the direction and draw a line toward the signal from where you are.
Then you drive to at least two more locations to get additional bearings and draw more lines. Usually, the lines will not quite intersect, but will form a small triangle. So you drive to the triangle and search some more.

Our fox simply drove to a secluded spot and started broadcasting. But the foxes on other hunts have been sneakier. I heard of one fellow who hid his transmitter in a phone connection box on the side of a house. And another placed his in a baby carriage pushed around a zoo by an imposing, burly fellow whose appearance alone discouraged approach by all but the most tenacious triangulators.

But however fun the hunt, it had dead-serious implications.

Suppose a plane went down in bad weather in our rugged mountains. Without benefit of airborne reconnaissance, these amateur radio operators - all volunteers - could easily be the first persons in the woods getting cold and wet trying to find the plane’s emergency beacon.

When time means lives, you need people who know what they’re doing, which is well understood by the Federal Communications Commission. Through its incentive licensing program for hams, the FCC maintains a pool of qualified, trained operators for use in emergencies - at no additional cost to taxpayers.

On-site hams - with personal knowledge of the area, local resources and needs - provide an invaluable link to outside help long before and after disaster teams arrive. As one club member told me, “Don’t let anyone tell you this is just a hobby. It’s public service.”

But most of their contributions, while less dramatic, are equally important.

Hams routinely provide checkpoint communications for charity walks and bicycle rides, alerting other volunteers or paramedics when exhausted persons need transportation or medical attention, keeping police informed about the location of the main body of participants, or simply reporting that station six has run out of lemonade.

The last weekend of June every year since 1935, hams have conducted Field Day, a 24-hour, tent-based, disaster simulation to practice their skills and test the limits of both their equipment and themselves. Of the 650,000 hams in the U.S., nearly two-thirds usually participate.

Some of their stories, though, border on Reader’s Digest material. I was told of a stroke victim who, unable to talk, banged on his hospital bed rail with a spoon and was thought to be demented until a ham neurosurgeon recognized the tappings as Morse Code and responded in kind.

Hams generally fall into two overlapping categories: users and tinkers. And I was told that the latter has been at least partly responsible for such electronic innovations as the transistor, telephone devices for the deaf (TDDs) and spread-spectrum radio - a primarily military application developed by film star (and ham) Hedy Lamarr and her husband to help ships and planes avoid enemy detection. Such ideas are sometimes commercially patented by hams, but most often are spread casually through trade magazines and routine communication.

Ham radio has also made the leap into space. Not only has NASA included a ham set on the International Space Station for backup communication and morale, but amateur operators, through the American Radio Satellite Association, have piggybacked on other launches to place ham relay equipment in orbit. Satellites are currently operated by organizations in the U.S., Russia, Japan and France.

Despite the technology, through, amateur radio is not necessarily expensive. Local club dues are only $15 a year, and Saturday’s most sophisticated device, working on the same principle as Doppler weather forecasting, cost only $150. Most of the direction finders were homemade and - resembling roof-mounted television aerials - were constructed of PVC piping and strips cut from metal roll-up tape measures.

In fact, the winning team, which found the fox in just under an hour, successfully employed just such a device, combined with a sharp eye. On their way down Broadway to a suspected fox hideout, they spotted the referee’s yellow windbreaker across a tree-crowded ravine near Highland Hospital.

The $150 kit came in dead last and only after lots of help. In all fairness, though, Saturday was the kit’s maiden voyage and, after “smoke testing” at the fox site, it was found to be miscalibrated 180 degrees. Every positive fix on the fox had sent that team in the opposite direction.

But amid good-natured ribbing and genuine laughter all around, one ham succinctly captured the morning’s swirl of blinking lights, topographic maps, and just plain fun:

“You spend all that money on a Doppler and get beat by a tape measure.”

(Lewis Garnett lives in Maggie Valley. He can be reached at lgar@brinet.com. For more information on hams, visit the website at www.wcars.org)

 

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