Circular Woods Why is it that most people hiding for DF competitions are nice people 99% of the time, but for the other 1% they just cannot resist inflicting pain and anguish on their fellow human beings (SADISTS)? A case in point was a national qualifying event run by SMRC a few years ago.

To get an idea of the problems our poor victims were about to face you should know that circular aerials are nasty. Very nasty indeed. The problem you have with circular aerials is not so much finding them, as what happens if you get into the middle of one. It's bad enough if you get too close to a straight (!) aerial, your DF set overloads, but you can get away from under it. With a circular aerial, the trouble is that the receiver gets a uniform signal from all directions -(actually there's a sharp null at the feed point but you'd need a very good receiver front end to find it!)- your receiver overloads and you can't get away from it!

The site was a wood hard against the perimeter fence at Manchester Airport. The guys hiding managed to loose nearly 1km of wire into the trees. That in its self is not unusual, the added bonus there was this nice long fence which some one had left cluttering up the place -(the perimeter fence at the Airport). The wire was tied to the fence at one side of the wood, ran round the wood and was tied off to the perimeter fence on the other side of the wood. The transmitter was fed an arbitrary distance round from the fence, and tuned up just fine. The operatives secreted themselves into the middle of a nice bramble bush on a bank over looking a rather evil looking pond -a pair of garden shears were employed to cut the hide into the bush and the cuttings used to plug the hole once people were inside.

The antenna must have radiated well to the start, because within five minutes of the second transmission the first victim arrived on site. To be blunt he stayed all afternoon. The operators were impressed with speed at which the victim ran away from them every time they keyed the transmitter. Victim one was joined by a second poor unsuspecting chap about 40 minutes later.

"Hello Trevor, any luck?" (Yes victim one was Trevor Gage)

"No"

"Have you found the aerial?"

"Yes"

"Why not follow it?"

"Because the F****ing things circular"

"Ah!"

And off they went, both to assault various bushes around the wood which looked as if they might contain some people with a transmitter. As the afternoon progressed lots of people started to fill the wood. All beating up bushes and gradually making their way to the pond. Every time they got too close the bramble bush, the transmitter was turned on and off they all scattered. Eventually the game was up. The hiders had not done such a good job plugging the hole into the bush as they thought. On what must have been about the anti-penultimate transmission, one competitor in his hurry to get away from the pond and back to the fence slipped on the embankment, and as he got up looked right. With a magnificent cry of - "Behold the wireless apparatus", he handed in his form. Now strange to report, every body in the wood managed to get their form signed without Trevor seeing them, until all was quiet again, apart from the birds, the roar of the jets taking off and the distant crashes of Trevor beating hell out of the wrong bushes. Eventually with but a only a few minutes to go he did find the transmitter, but not until the late comers had shown him.