Gerry

Do you use a FT817, because if you do you may be interested in my experiences with my FT817 in the last Backpackers which ran along side the 144 MHz open.

At one point in the contest I experienced virtually the same symptoms you describe from G5UM/P at Sceffington, I could hear mush from them all over the band, (much worse than CKR), and I could hear weak and resolvable signals from them many KHz from their fundamental frequency. But when this did happen, I was beaming right at them (due East) and I suspect they may have been beaming at me. I only experienced this for about 5 minutes. After that I didn’t have any further problems.

I was only using the FT817, and did not have any external pre-amp.

I spoke to Alex (G8FCQ), who told me he was running at IC910, so I suppose that’s about 100 to a 10db gain antenna.

So maybe the FT817 can be overloaded give the right conditions. Were you using an external amp with pre-amp when this happened?

73 de Tim G4ARI