so ive been chasing a pretty rare one for a while now, not gonna say which entity but it was a short window DXpedition and the pileup was absolutely brutal. like genuinely one of the worst ive dealt with in maybe 10 years of serious DXing. thought id write up what actually worked vs what didnt because i see a lot of bad advice floating around on this stuff.

first thing that actually helped was listening way more than i was transmitting. sounds obvious but i spent a good 20 minutes just watching where the op was pulling people from before i even keyed up. he had a pattern, maybe not totally consistent but enough to get a feel for it. was working maybe 5-7 up most of the time but occasionally dipping to 3 up when the rate slowed. once i figured that out i stopped throwing my call out blind and started placing it more deliberately in that window.

second thing, and this is more controversial i guess, i dropped my power a little. running full legal limit into a stack was just contributing to the mess honestly. a lot of people think more watts = more chance of getting through but in a really dense pileup with hundreds of stations it mostly just adds to the noise floor on their end. timing and placement matter way more than that last 3db.

also ran split properly on the rig, had the vfo tracking set so i wasnt accidentally drifting. seen so many people get this wrong and theyre calling on the DX frequency without realizing it. the dx op was pretty clearly ignoring anything that wasnt in the right window anyway.

ended up getting through on maybe my 8th or 9th attempt once i dialed all that in. not fast but way better than the hour of random calling i was doing before i stopped and thought about it.

yeah the listening thing is massively underrated. i used to just jump in and start calling and wonder why i never got through. took me embarassingly long to realize the dx op has a method even when it doesnt seem like it. some of them work by region, some by frequency discipline, some by callsign suffix and if you dont pick up on which one youre just wasting everyones time including your own.

one thing i'd add is callsign length matters more than people think in a cw pileup. shorter suffix is a real advantage, nothing you can do about that, but you can at least make sure your sending is clean and at a speed that matches what the op seems to prefer. ive heard guys blasting away at 35wpm into a pileup where the dx is clearly running 20 and it just doesnt help.

the power thing you mentioned is interesting. i half agree. below a certain threshold youre just not making it through the noise but yeah there's definitely a point of diminishing returns and a lot of lid behavior is people cranking everything and just creating splatter.

this is the kind of post i wish i had found when i first got into dx chasing. i only have like 130 entities confirmed and pileups still stress me out honestly. i always feel like im doing something wrong when i cant get through and its hard to know if its technique or just conditions or both.

question for you, were you on ssb or cw for this one? i find ssb pileups feel way more chaotic to me, at least on cw you can kinda hear where people are in the passband if you have a decent receiver. on ssb it just sounds like a wall of noise and i have no idea where to even start.