[snarkpup]

But if you were getting swamped by a few blowtorch stations it sounds like a bad receiver - and certainly there are some real crappy ones out there.

It was a Drake R7.

[Clinging Bitterly]

You’re stretching my memory now. Although Drake was known for building some nice gear, I think I remember hearing rumblings about lemons in the R7/TR7 line, and it was a major evolution from their earlier lines - but a neighbor of mine ran a RTTY mailbox on a TR7 (and an AppleII computer) for almost 20 years, and that’s hard duty. The rig sat on his top shelf and just worked.