I was out walking in the peak district with friends yesterday and popped up to Shining Tor G/SP-004 on the way back as it was over a year since I’d last been and I wanted to try the shorter route from the main road.
The walk was trivial and I was at the summit in under 30 minutes.
The telescopic pole antenna was attached to the signpost and took advantage of the facilities at the summit (stone walls for shelter plus a nice bench to sit on) and managed to activate the summit on 2m FM in under 5 minutes but stayed around a while longer for any other chasers.
After 10 minutes or so, I was getting strong (S5-S6) signals on the FT3D but the squelch wasn’t opening, and I was struggling to hear some chasers as they sounded weaker. I tried changing frequency, but it seemed to be the same on other channels.
On 145.575 MHz there was some morse being transmitted - S9 but very crackly. It sounded like a repeater ident, but went on for longer.
I didn’t have my bandpass filter with me as I’ve never had a QRM issue on this summit before - but the FT3D is new to me.
After getting 1 more in the log and no more responses I decided to call it quits and head back down.
Is there an issue with QRM on 2m on this summit? Or does it just have such a good takeoff that I’m receiving half of the UK here?
Next time I’ll certainly take a BPF and a directional antenna.
Not on that frequency. Probably someone’s morse lessons.
That is most likely the problem. Of the Fusion capable handies, the FT70 is reported to work well in strong signal environments but the FT3 and FT5 do not have such a good reputation. You probably will need your bandpass filter with that radio a lot of the time when you put a better antenna on it.
It’s a bummer when these things happen and spoil an activation.
I’d have to partially disagree. I use my ft-3d exclusively and I only once ever had a problem and that was on Brimmond Hill in Aberdeen, with more masts than you can shake a stick at.
I make sure my one is set exclusively to FM, rather than leaving the radio to auto-detect whether an incoming signal is analogue, digital or what ever. That’s all I can think of…
I never had any problem up there back in the summer, nothing interference wise from the mast that overlooks the road, there are several people that do CW practice lessons on 2M in the NW and Shropshire, not sure about yesterday but there was a lot of activity in the past week
What you describe is strange, it isn’t something I have witnessed. I have been up three times in the last week and haven’t encountered it.
There are occasional Morse lessons, there is someone called Linda that runs these. Maybe Tom @M1EYP could throw some light on it.
Last weekend I think on Sunday there was some band wide (20m) interference that lasted for a while.
I’ve heard the more practice lessons in the past but they’re normally on 144.xxx MHz, but it could have been someone else. Sounded pretty good anyway who/whatever it was.
The other QRM sounded digital when I turned the squelch off, more like C4FM than DMR. I should’ve put the radio into Fusion mode to check
