so ive been licensed about 6 years and for most of that time whenever i ran into a big pileup i just kind of gave up after a few tries and moved on. figured my 100w and a wire antenna wasnt gonna cut it against the kilowatt stations with yagis. but last month there was a VP8 expedition on 17m and i really wanted it for a new one, so i actually sat down and paid attention to what was happening before i just started calling.

what i noticed was the DX was working split, listening about 3-4 up, and most of the pileup was clustered right at the bottom of his listening range. so i went up maybe 5 or 6 khz above where everyone else was and just waited for a moment where things thinned out a little. got him on the third call. 100w into a end-fed halfwave. i was honestly kind of shocked.

i think the thing i was doing wrong all those years was just calling on top of everyone else and expecting to get through by luck. listening first and finding the edges of where hes actually tuning seems so obvious now but i genuinely didnt think about it before. anyone else have specific techniques that work for them? especially curious if anyone has tips for 160 or 40 where the pileups get really nasty and the dx signal itself is sometimes barely there

yeah that edge of the passband thing is real and it works way more often than people think. the DX op is usually sweeping across his listening range and if 80% of the callers are stacked at the bottom he might only spend a second or two there before moving up. if youre sitting at the top of his range youre getting more of his attention per sweep basically.

on 160 its a whole different animal though. timing matters a lot more because propagation windows can be really short and the noise floor is brutal on both ends. i try to listen to the DX signal for a few minutes and figure out if he has a pattern — some ops work strictly low to high, some jump around, some work by region. if you can figure out the pattern youre ahead of 90% of the pileup. also on top band i find that sending your callsign once clearly beats sending it three times in a row because the ops copy better when theyre not trying to dig through a wall of noise. less is more. i run about 500w into a full size vertical with a decent radial field and that helps but ive worked some tough ones at lower power too when the timing was right

this is something i struggled with for a long time too. one thing that helped me was actually watching some of the DXpedition operator videos on youtube where they film the operating position during a big pileup. you can kinda hear what they're hearing and it gives you a sense of what cuts through vs what just adds to the noise. some of those ops are working like 4-5 stations a minute which is impressive but also means your window is tiny if your call doesnt pop out immedietly.

i also read somewhere that sending your suffix only if the DX is clearly working through partials can help, like if he says "station ending in uniform november" dont send your whole call again just send the UN part. seems like common sense but i used to just blast my whole callsign every time regardless of what he was doing