Newbie in over his head

I'm an electronics newbie, about to undertake a project, in which I know what I want the final outcome to be, but I don't know how to get there. It is based upon a product I have used in the past, but can be made better.

It is a reel with a magnetic switch, that when turned, operates a buzzer and a small LED light. I would like to either modify the current product, or make my own. Buzzer Reel

I would like to have a reel with a magnetic switch, that when turned, sends out some sort of an alert to a scanner. Perhaps a radio frequency? It probably only needs to cover about 100' or so. This may include some sort of an antenna and a receiver. I would like to have 4 or maybe up to 6 of these systems, each operating on a separate frequency to identify which sensor has been tripped.

Any ideas?

I had made a circuit similar to this, not for fishing though, what I had used was an old stepper motor connected to a schmitt buffer connected to a monostable 555 timing circuit. When the stepper stepped, it generated a pulse, which was buffered by the schmitt and triggered the timing circuit which lit up an LED.

It could've been modified to go through a counter first, then after x number of pulses it would trigger the timer.

You could also use a comparator instead of schmitt buffer to give better control over the triggering threshold.

as for the RF part, instead of a LED, you could send a pulse over one of those cheap RF transmitter/receiver pairs (like from Robotshop.ca, or Sparkfun.com)