There are a couple of good threads with stories of activators who have had “summit brain” & done something stupid but I’m interested to hear if any chasers have committed what I call “random acts of muppeteering” (which I define as “an act of remarkable stupidity due to absent mindedness, bad implementation, a lack of thought, a lack of knowledge or just a badly conceived idea by an otherwise fairly intelligent & sensible person or group of people”).
Yesterday I went to my 3 acre site where I have a couple of antennas set up to do some work on the antennas in preparation for CQWW in a couple of months time. This went without any hitches and when I was done I decided to test the antennas by chasing some SOTA.
I was incredibly frustrated to find a loud “popping sound” at 0.5 second intervals which was S8 on the radio with the attenuator on across all of the bands making it extremely difficult to hear weaker stations. I normally have only S1 noise maximum at this location.
We have horses in the field so I put this down to the electric fence which runs near the antenna. I persevered & managed to get around 40-50 chaser points, which is extremely good by my standards but I could have got more if it wasn’t for the interference from the electric fence.
After packing up I went for a wonder around the site to check up on a few things and discovered that the electric fence was turned off!
I was powering the radio from the leisure battery in my motorhome & I suspect that the interference was actually coming from the solar charging system fitted to the motorhome. I’m absolutely kicking myself because I could have turned that off if I needed to.
Basically I inadvertently increased my own noise level by around 7 S-points (which is higher than my noisy urban home QTH) without realising!
Has anyone else done anything stupid like this? Let’s have a laugh at some chaser mistakes.