I asked ray to have a look at this. He fixed it by updating the Connections/DBConnection.php and removing the line to set the character set to UTF 8.
It looks like your database table is not set to use UTF 8 encoding, so setting the character set in the connection to UTF 8 is causing the problem.
if the table does not use UTF 8 encoding, you cant use UTF 8 as the character set for the connection.