Convention 25 results

Sniffer hunt 2025

A huge thanks to all who attended and ensured the success of the Australian Foxhunting Championship and Convention held by SERG on the 7th and 8th of June. There were 120+ conventioneers plus 8 teams of fox hunters. The VK3s were successful but the VK5s were hot on their heels. Watch out next year 🙂 

Homebrew competition

Many busy lives meant that the competition was not well supported this year. That’s not to say people aren’t doing things but the pressure of daily life and preparation for the foxhunting reduced the priority to submit an entry. SERG has been re-assured that there will be a resurgence in 2026.

Well, Norbert VK5MQ and Bruce VK3TJN did participate and the quality was excellent.

Bruce showed his ‘Fox hunt self tester’ a device that permits calibration of the beam pointing software in their equipment. Essentially the problem to be overcome was the slow transfer of data from the microcontroller to the direction finding software. By the time the data was transferred the antenna had moved on and this resulted in directional errors of of up to 180 deg. Not useful for foxhunting!  The solution was his well documented tester that enabled corrections to be made in the field. His documentation was excellent.
Bruce received 1st prize in the homebrew competition.

Norbert presented 3 homebrew baluns. The smallest was a 9:1 balun for end feeding an antenna. Compact but capable of up to 125W of RF. A design that could well be copied by those working in the field with an end fed 1/2 wave on 40. His second balun was designed for a similar power level but was a 1:1 balun to reduce common mode currents on the coax and is frequently used at the centre of a 1/2 wave dipole. A feature was the inclusion of a paper fuse (or was it instructions?) that would burn if too much power was dissipated in the ring. We think that was tongue in cheek. His third balun with a more robust ferrite ring was designed to reduce common mode currents and could be used for open wire line and coax cable. The unique feature was the provision of a spark gap from a Harris transmitter and a 2W resistor to remove any static buildup.
Norbert received second prize.

Big thanks to both homebrewers for their participation.

Below are the results of the foxhunting. Congratulations to all.

Ready to go 2025
Norbert’s 3 baluns
Greg VK5ZGY and Tim VK5AV the Foxhunt organisers
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