Dave,
That's a good suggestion given that I have ladder line coming into the shack.? I set the K2 power to 0 and got the same results.
Anyway, this looks like a really hard problem to troubleshoot since getting a debug log makes the problem go away (heisenbug?) and since it appears the problem is something specific to my setup.? So I'm really happy to just run with the debug log enabled since I don't plan to spend too much time doing FT8.? At least I can do FT8 fox/hound mode now if the need arises which is why I was pursuing this problem.
73 de Benjy AC4XO