noting this thread has 99 posts, it’s appropriate for me to post #100.
The 2m/70cm challenge has boosted activity on those bands in the Canberra area. On a recent activation of Mt Stromlo I found a problem occurred on 432 where the ft817 power output meter indicated full output without any audio input to the mike. suspecting an RF feedback issue I made several changes to the setup including output power level and disconnecting the speech compressor normally in the mike lead. None of those changes removed the problem and it even occurred on cw and AM mode. Having included a home made dummy load on a BNC plug in my kit I tried that and found it also occurred there. to cut a long story short I ended up on 2m with the dummy load plugged into the front panel antenna socket. Then I heard Al vk1rx about 10-12 km away on another summit and I gave him a call, sure enough we completed an S2S contact using 4 x 220 ohm resistors as an antenna. A few days later I was operating the same gear in my backyard and made a contact with Andrew VK1AD on Black Mt, a similar distance.
So I suggest a subset of the challenge this year is to make contacts at good distances using a dummy load. There would be extra points for S2S contacts or for using the lowest power level from the 817, normally 0.5w. Entries via mail to my PO box, cash donations at the contestant’s whim.
73 Andrew vk1da
PS. decided eventually this apparent instability problem was due to the relay contacts on the antenna selector relay, the problem only occurred with the front connector and those contacts are the normally closed set. Exercising the Front/Rear relay using deep menu #7 seemed to clean the contacts as the problem stopped happening. The relay cleaning function in the 857 and 897(?) is not in the early model 817. the instability is presumably due to the contacts having enough resistance to increase the impedance of the antenna, especially on 432 mhz, thus putting the amplifier into unknown territory with a high impedance load. Whenever this happened I dropped the PTT to avoid damaging the final amplifier. So far that is working. It still seems to output 5w on that setting.