Fox Hunt Transmitter Build Using a Arduino + Baofeng

so i've been working on uh this for uh the last couple of weeks now initially i started building this out of a raspberry pi so this is the uh fox fox hunt tracker that we're gonna use in about uh what is it about three weeks time yep two three four uh for the for the club now this is you've got the little micro fox which is in the little canister yep so this is the slightly higher powered one powered one so we yeah and much more sexy case uh so i got this from bunnings uh this is a tactics uh case this was i think about twenty three dollars twenty twenty three twenty five dollars um yeah i think it's ip don't quote me i think it's ip67 it might be 65. 65 maybe um but um but i've conveniently put amateur radio hidden transmitter and also put do not tamper and my mobile number which i better cover over um on the back as well um and the reason for that is because if any member of the public comes along and finds it and there's an antenna on the top and it is sitting out there they're gonna wonder what it is and may potentially call call the police and say we're not sure what this is so we want to make sure that we label it accordingly yeah we're doing the bomb squad thing later yeah yeah yeah that's right that's right i've also got a padlock and a chain oh to go on here um because we don't want anyone to flog it so and that means that we can then hide it wherever we want in hobart definitely um now so i'll start off with the raspberry pi but the problem with the pie was that because the sd card that's in it you need to power down the pi every single time you turn it off to otherwise you might get a corrupt sd card so that was a problem you can do it if you write a script and a button and it kind of become a little bit too difficult and i was going to use the pie for something else anyway so what i did was i put a um arduino an arduino uno yeah in here with a little relay board and so you've got the you've got the baofeng radio so a 20 or 25 thing uh you've got the uh the arduino uno okay with the wires all coming out i didn't really keep it neat because i didn't think i needed to um and there's a little over here there's a little switch which is just wired directly onto the onto the positive of the battery okay with the fuse and everything yep um this step down transformer oh okay this is music conversion yeah to power the thing because the power thing runs off 7.4 volts so there's a little um battery eliminator you can run the baufen battery it'll last a it'll last quite a long time okay but i just bought this little 1.2 amp hour seal that acid cool and then what i did was ran this coax into the top and i used some aluminium tape okay as a bit of a ground plane just so that it uh it's got something to act on um which conveniently a crappy baufang antenna makes a very good fox hunt antenna because you want it strong but you don't want it too strong so um unfortunately the only problem with with these is that the smas they you can only get bulkhead female connectors the sma that is on and about it on the bow things is also an sma uh female okay okay so that's why i need the barrel to be able to connect them to male 1 but i do have some better antennas coming which pack a proper connector okay but cool for this this this can be heard quite a while away um so the the idea behind it which we're going to do on the fox hunt day well the idea that i think we've got is that for this we're going to go and hide it i think i'll start off with hiding it somewhere cool and then whoever goes and finds it the first person to find it they get to hide it the next time we do this and so on and so forth excellent um if someone finds it really quickly which they probably might uh then we may potentially have time to hide it again okay we'll just see but i think the idea is we're going to start at about 9 30 in the morning and about lunchtime about 12 o'clock we're all going to come back up here and have a barbecue and a bit of a lover a debrief love it so what you have to do is if you're on the frequency on the two meter frequency and you're right on top of it you can unscrew your antenna um and this really goes for any fox transmitter really um go to a harmonic that's right because the problem is is it's too it's still way too strong you could be you could be several meters away and you can't see it visible but you'll still hear it because it's that strong so what you do is you multiply the harmonic the second harmonic third harmonic usually which is about 70 centimeter band and then usually because of the deviation the signal you probably have to add about five kilohertz to the exact frequency exact third harmonic and then that's good because it's a lot weaker and it's a lot easier to find correct um the other thing that we could also do is this is on the this is this will be running one watt um because it runs one what we could put like a little three db or a little six db sma attenuator in him we could even put it down to half a watt or 250 milliwatts because you're still going to hear it um quite well so um basically what we do is i've got the battery unplugged but you put the battery on and we turn it on and what we'll do is we'll turn on my other another bar thing and what a sexy battery yeah bright yellow and i need i need to change the programming and the timing of it can we get a long tone okay which is good that's good at the moment it's just sending my call sign in fox but i could probably make that a little bit longer okay um wait for the end here we get a little um what just happened then our rfi still gets into this thing so if you've got the lid open i noticed that the rfi actually gets back into the uno in it so that resets the uni does it no it doesn't reset the uno it just sounds funny on the audio but as soon as you shut the lid it's fine yeah so um it's it's a dirty fox hunt transmitting this dirty fox up transmitter uh but it'd be perfectly fine for what we want it to do so um so pretty cheap because you can buy these you know it's like rfi taking out the uh the monitor the monitor um so yeah and then the good thing is is whoever finds it um will have a combination lock on it so we'll just tell everyone the combination um you can open it up turn it off whatever um we might even have a go mobile maybe we'll even have a hidden hidden message in here or something like that um so yeah it should be a whole lot of fun so yeah fantastic that's good i love it i love it i love it now um the arduino did you did you start from scratch or did you hack code or what did you do okay so this is my first arduino project believe it or not i've never dabbled with the arduinos before um this project i have him now so so this this idea of using the arduino i got from another amateur on youtube called uh charlie n7jv okay he is red samut rf okay he did a um he did a video on this and the code comes from a club in i think canada okay and basically you can go in download the code upload it change your call sign you can change stuff like the um tone of the cw and the speed and you just upload it build it according to the circuit and and away you go i love it um so really really easy a lot easier than building a script in a raspberry pi didn't take as long yeah correct um and then obviously you could use any handheld that you want um just using the bauffin because that's that's the one that i had at home um but uh but yeah nice little and a lot the good thing too is about the colors it sort of will blend in a little bit so we can hide it under hide it under a bush i think we could do a bit of camo on it yeah yeah oh very good so i'm a little bit worried about it's going to be too strong but that's okay um a bit of a challenge so be where it will turn your editors definitely bring your attenuator along um and and you know we can get creative maybe in the future and have this hooked up to like a directional antenna pointing the wrong way or something like that yeah or some people take the antenna off we'll take the antenna off um oh so there's two versions of the code that they have okay um they have a normal uh like a normal one like this you just turn it on and away it goes they've also got another version uh which this is wired up for but i haven't put the code in where you press a dtmf tone on your radio and it will start start it going okay and then when it stops transmitting and it's listening you can press another button and it will stop transmitting so you can actually remotely control turn it on and i love it love it love it love it so because that that that just presents another degree of difficulty because you have little short bursts where you that's the only time that you get to effort so yeah i think the idea with what we were going to do um because we kind of haven't really discussed it properly but i think what we were going to do is we were going to get the micro fox and we were going to probably hide it somewhere on the domain there's a bit of a trial run yes for people to just like test their radios make sure they're all working that'd be great and then what we'll do is we'll get this um to get this going much further away yeah and then hopefully in the future we can do these more regularly like on a friday night or something because like in summer we've got plenty of light and summer um and we could you know do it on a friday evening and we could go out and try and find them so um so basically we'll go off we'll hide it we'll say cool we're just about ready to go and uh switch and then and then and then yeah get a get a team together and see if you can if you find it it's going to be a lot of fun it it they are they are this is really good fun oh i did forget to mention with the fox hunts there are going to be prizes prizes i am going to be sponsoring some prizes so um don't hem radio dx pro so you better be so you better come along because if you're not here on the fox hunt day you're not going to be able to win a prize got to be in it to win that's right so if you're not here you can't win it correct good ass what's with the hat what's with the hat yeah no no um last week when we interviewed warren down at casey station i made sure i wore the hat and i thought i'm going to wear it again ah yeah so uh so yeah it is actually a comes from comes from the us and it is real rabbit skin so i've just lost a whole bunch of viewers out there but anyway so it's not that cold really but it's actually not that cold your head's probably sweating and if you if you um well i have actually just had a haircut so i don't have much hair but uh very nice and very warm and if you if you put the flaps down on it you can't hear a damn thing you definitely need to have flaps down that flaps up yeah no flaps down oh now you look like an aviator yeah yeah yeah but you can't you absolutely can't hear a thing so um so yeah you've got to um uh you've got to definitely have flaps up anyway enough of that we'll catch you uh catch you next week at 73 and we'll uh we'll see you next time around cheers

Channel: Ham Radio DX

Views: 6,436

Keywords: ham radio, amateur radio, ham radio dx, vk7hh, ham radio australia, hrdx, amatuer radio, ham radio fox hunt, ham radio fox hunt transmitter, ham radio fox hunt equipment, homebrew ham radio, fox hunt transmitter, fox hunt transmitter controller, fox hunt ham radio, fox transmitter ham radio, fox hunting ham radio, fox hunting transmitter, ham radio arduino, ham radio baofeng, ham radio baofeng uv-5r, baofeng fox hunt transmitter

Id: BkBhdOc0WKs

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022