Development of transmitter and receiver for fox hunting activity

Transmitter hunting, also known as fox hunting, is a popular activity amongst amateur radio hobbyists. The concept of this activity is based on radio direction finding. This study has two main parts, namely, the transmitter and the receiver. The transmitter uses Arduino Uno and Baofeng radios. GPS and GSM tracker is also added at the transmitter for location-monitoring purposes. The transmitter will be hidden in a designated area, and a Morse code that has been programmed in Arduino will be sent. For the receiver part, two receiver antennas with different designs and materials, namely, Yagi and Moxon, are used. These two antennas operate in a frequency range of 144 MHz and 145 MHz, respectively, and will be connected to an attenuator to reduce the strength of the received signal. Subsequently, these antennas will be connected to a Baofeng radio. The type of attenuator in this study is a step attenuator with three different gains, namely, 6, 10 and 20 dB. The use of an attenuator can reduce gain between 6.62 dB and 10.04 dB for Yagi antenna and between 2.66 dB and 12.64 dB for Moxon antenna. A test has been carried out at Parit Haji Rais area to compare the reception quality between Yagi and Moxon antennas. The test is carried out at four locations with different distances, namely, 350, 550, 700 and 900 m. The antennas can work well up to 550 m from the transmitter. Moxon antenna has a slightly better performance than Yagi antenna based on the distance.