HF rigs act weird during the weekends

My HF rigs act weird during the weekends. In some mysterious way both my Kenwood TS-570DG and Yaesu FT-920 are suddenly way more sensitive than normal. I hear stations I never heard before, for no apparent reason at all.

“Well, more sensitive, that’s a good thing” you might say. Unfortunately there’s a con too: my SSB filters suddenly fail miserably. It proves to be impossible for my receivers to separate a number of stations; some of them are up to 25 KHz(!) wide and a few are causing horrible crackling noises way beyond those 25 KHz.

Weird. Only during the weekends. While there are contests going on. Just a coincidence?

“Clearing The Frequency”
Not really. While 99% of the contest stations won’t mess up my receivers is any way, there are a few who do – sometimes on purpose. “Clearing the frequency” one station called it, while laughing. It’s a practice often done just before a contest begins. Just make your linear amplifier non-linear by overloading it in some way, and combine this with a really dirty sound compressor set to max.

Linearity is a desirable property, the station argued, but it comes at the cost of reduced efficiency when clearing a frequency. I’m glad we’re talking about a very small minority here, but it’s still annoying to say the least.