Tracking down the fox can sure get the adrenalin flowing; as you get closer to the area where the fox is probably hidden, and you start flipping those switches to put more attenuation into the line, your excitement continues to mount. Often, you will see other hunters in the area, too, and the sense of competition to be the first to find the fox only adds to the fun.
Being the addicts that we are here in Albuquerque, though, the hunt is rarely over after you have found the area where the fox is hidden. Some of our hiders have developed the art of disguising the fox to the point that driving to the area is the "easy part" of the hunt :-). The actual final identity of the fox must still be made, before your work is done.
Here are a few of the past tricks used by local hunters.
A favorite hunt was one where Ed made a four-element beam antenna out of artificial plant stems. It seems that a local craft store had a variety of these artificial plants, made with aluminum stems. As it happened, he discovered that some of them looked exactly like a type of wild flower (actually, a weed) that grows in this area.
He buried the transmitter in a patch of the real weeds, which grew along the edge of a corn field. Using one of the fake weeds as the antenna for the transmitter, he arranged the others to form a beam, which directed the signal to bounce off the mountains on the east edge of town.
Hunters weren't too fooled by the bounce, and most found the corn field without too much trouble. Identifying the fox, though, was a different matter! I can attest to this, because I was one of those hunters who actually stood in the weed patch, straddling the fox at times, the signal coming from every direction, confused as to what to do next. The signal was so strong, you just knew the fox was near, but it took a very sharp eye to spot the fake weeds, and identify what you were seeing.
To tell the truth, a lot of the fun was watching all the other hunters, who were having the same problems.
Ed is also credited with concealing a 15-element beam in a pile of tumbleweeds,
but that is another story :-)
(I have some pictures of that, but will have to find someone to scan them
for me, so that I can post them here).
As is Jim's nature, he always stages some short hunts at the hamfest, intended to get people interested in finding out more about our favorite hobby. He will often conceal a low-power transmitter somewhere around the hamfest, and the hamfest hosts will usually offer some prize to the person who finds the fox first. Everyone is invited to participate, especially "newbies".
In this instance, he concealed the transmitter in a soda-can, and placed it on the table of one of the other hams at the hamfest, amongst the goodies offered for sale by that ham. To all outward appearances, it looked like a can of soda, sitting innocently in one of those foam-insulators. In fact, if you were bold enough to actually look inside this person's soda-can, you could see the soda inside! This, and the fact that the ham watching over the table had a perfect poker-face, was enough to shake your confidence that you were even looking in the right area :-)
Jim had made a false bottom in the middle of the can, and placed the transmitter in the bottom half. For an antenna, he wound some very thin wire around the outside of the can, and then placed the whole thing in a foam insulator, to conceal the wire. Then the special touch: he filled the top half of the can with soda. A lot of people spent a lot of time figuring this one out (me included)!
At another hamfest, Jim had hollowed out a small wooden log, and placed a low-power transmitter inside. The event was being held outdoors, so he placed the log somewhat away from the parking area, such that it looked like an innocent scrap of wood. Of course, it took a while for the hunters to figure out the disguise, too.
After the hunt, I was talking to Jim about what a great disguise it was, and he happened to ask: "Do you know what kind of antenna that is?". Without thinking, I bit: "No, what?". With a straight face, he replied: "It's a log-periodic".
One hider, Ray (N5IRC), came up with a clever way to do this, using a passive repeater. Simply stated, he placed the fox on the East side of the river, with a directional antenna pointing across to the West side. On the West side, down river, he placed two additional antennas, connected to each other, with one aimed back at the antenna on the fox, and the second aimed at the starting-point. To lessen the chances that the hunters would see the signal from the actual fox, he used vertical polarization for the fox-to-reflector path, and horizontal polarization for the reflector-to-start_point path.
The way this worked is that the hunters saw the signal coming from the passive repeater as the strongest, and drove to the wrong side of the river, only to discover that the actual fox was back over on the other side!
It should be noted that the placement of the antennas, the fox, and the nature of the local terrain, are important in making this trick succeed. Secondly, the fact that hunters will usually orient their search antennas to get the strongest signal from the "fox", helps them miss the true signal if it is using different polarization.