Tag Archives: ardf

Baby fox

BF-888SOne of the exciting things in amateur radio at the moment is the unbelievably low price of the Chinese handheld radios. One of the very cheapest is the BF-888S. It’s a 16 channel 70cm unit putting out about 2.5W. I got a pair for $42 from a Chinese ebay seller.

These radios are so cheap, they make you want to invent projects to use them. One project I’ve had in mind for a while is to use them for ARDF/fox hunting (you hide a transmitter, and people drive/wander around with receivers trying to find it) with kids armed with little Yagis.

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2m Tape Measure Yagi

My club (BRC) is looking at getting in to some fox hunting as a way of creating some shared activities, so I’m going to need a simple, portable beam with a good front to back ratio in order to play.

I had a look around and vk3hra’s blog had a nice step-by-step so I decided to copy his. It’s based on the fairly common PCV pipe & tape measure approach. The idea with steel tape measure is that it bounces back from being folded, so it’s easy to fold the elements for transport etc. Here’s his design:

vk3hra tape measure beam

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