The Draussenfuchs Radio Fox Hunt Kit

Recently, the question came up again about how we should organize the next kids’ birthday party. We’d prefer it if the kids could celebrate somewhere outside the house, so we needed to come up with a suitable idea. A scavenger hunt is always a good option, and as a ham radio operator, I thought of combining it with amateur radio direction finding. So I searched the internet and found the great website Draussenfuchs.de. It provides a complete guide on how to put together a full set of equipment and even offers custom firmware for the Quansheng UV-K5, which displays the fox’s signal strength and prevents the handheld radio from transmitting. I won’t describe here how to assemble or put together the equipment, since this is already explained in detail on the Draussenfuchs website. Below are a few pictures of my set.

The complete case with all components:

Here are the individual components after they’ve been unpacked from the case:

Finally, a close-up of one of the foxes:

Initial experiments show that while everything works perfectly, the children are having trouble with location tracking despite the custom firmware. It probably takes quite a bit of practice to get the hang of it all.