Firetop

It’s very hard to reminisce about things you did as a teenager when few people that you know years later can share the memories. Last night over a beer at The Lincoln Arms (Kings Cross), I was recounting tales of CB radio glory from the mid 1990s, which lead me to talk about the Friday night foxhunts I took part in. No, they DIDN’T involve real foxes - more like hide and seek ‘Cannonball Run‘ style.

Essentially you have five or more cars and they get together at a meeting point (for us it was Fairlands Valley Park - Stevenage). Each car is fitted with a CB radio and aerial, the driver is accompanied by a ‘navigator’. I was too young to drive (what was my mum doing letting me out with loonies?) so Darren ‘Candy Man’ was the driver leaving me Matt ‘Mercenary’ …cringe… to use the rig (radio).

Each car puts £1 into the kitty and this becomes the game prize fund. A car is randomly drawn from a ‘hat’ and that car becomes the ‘fox’. The fox takes the prize money and has 30 minutes to hide within some predefined boundaries (usually about 8 miles by 8 miles). When they have hidden they give a dubious one-line clue and all the hunters shoot off to find them first. If they are discovered inside 45 minutes the finders get the prize money, if not the fox keeps the money. So how do you find the fox?

CB radio signal strength is indicated by a needle inside the radio’s front panel in ‘pounds’ with ‘30plus’ being the maximum strength and ‘1′ being the lowest (you can’t really make out a one pound voice clearly). The fox is asked to count to five or ten by the navigators ‘Can I have a count please fox’. Whilst the fox is transmitting a signal, the searching cars try and judge the signal’s direction by watching needle fluctuations as they circle a roundabout in their car. An aerial on the back of a car picks up a signal from the front better than any other direction due to the mass of metal forming the largest ground plane area. Using this technique you know if the strength goes up as you spin round that you have got the direction ahead of you.

As cars get nearer and nearer to the fox the clue might start to make sense. Within 100 meters of the ‘fox’ the CB radio needle will fluctuate no further (maxed out at 30 plus). So the aerial has to be unscrewed from the radio and the radio itself is physically waved around to gauge direction at such close proximity. Additional ‘flash your lights please fox’ requests are allowed (and often needed as foxhunts are a night time activity).

Foxhunt after foxhunt would occur well into the early hours, run-ins with police - called out by farmers or residents worried about ten cars driving up and down their small cul-de-sac were common. I recall we were banned from the village of Watton at Stone thanks to the antics of Paul Wild Willy in his mini.

As mainly a summer activity CB radio foxhunts were great fun, much better than Xboxing, watching DVDs or Internet chat rooms. Maybe I’ll try and organise one and hire out the equipment to participants - then again, I may be hard pushed.

GENERAL FOXHUNT RULES
1. Must stay inside any boundaries.
2. No linear amplifiers. No adjusting wattage.
3. Only 1 CB radio.
4. No enclosure, ie. inside lock fence, buildings, no erecting barriers to vehicles.
5. If clues are given, they must be accurate.
6. Must not get caught doing illegal things. i.e. speeding, trespassing (we definitely ignored this one)
7. Must complete game to collect winnings.
8. No switching vehicles. No changing locations.
9. Only the one hiding gives the clues.
10. No following other people.

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