so ive been chasing VP6 (Pitcairn) for like three years now, every time a DXpedition shows up i get nowhere. tried the usual stuff, calling on their frequency by accident, not listening carefully enough to where they were actually pulling calls from, just general bad habits i guess. last week VP6WR was active and i finally cracked it on 17m CW after about two hours of trying off and on.

what changed was i stopped just throwing my call out randomly and actually sat and listened for a solid 10-15 minutes first. figured out they were working split, listening about 3-4 up from where they were transmitting, and they had a pretty clear pattern of moving their listening frequency up maybe 500hz every 3-4 QSOs. once i mapped that out i just parked about where i thought they'd land next and sent my call maybe 2-3 times per transmission cycle instead of hammering it constantly. picked up on my first attempt after i did that.

im running an IC-7610 into a 3 element SteppIR at about 45 feet so its not a barefoot HT situation, but i wasnt running crazy power either, just 100w. the antenna does most of the work honestly. anyway curious if others have specific techniques that work for them, especially on CW vs SSB since i feel like they operate pretty differently in a pile

yeah the listening part is huge and most people skip it completely. ive worked something like 340 entities at this point and the single biggest mistake i see in pileups, especially on phone, is people who just start yelling their callsign the second they find the frequency without even figuring out the split. then they're transmitting on the DX station's rx frequency and just making it worse for everybody.

on SSB i find that sending just the last two letters of your callsign can work really well when the pile is massive, especially if the op is already pulling partials. on CW i tend to do exactly what you did, short calls, time them to end just before the DX would start listening, dont send your full callsign three times in a row because it just bleeds into the next cycle. and yeah figuring out the dx op's rhythm is probably 80% of it. some ops are very methodical, some are all over the place and you just have to get lucky with those ones.

the other thing that helped me was upgrading from a dipole to a yagi a few years back, obviously that made a difference, but technique still matters even with a mediocre signal. ive been beaten to a QSO by guys running 100w and a wire when i had the beam pointed right at them because they timed their call better.

nice one on the VP6, thats a tough one. question though -- when you say you figured out they were moving their listening frequency up, were you just manually tuning around or do you have some way to visualize that? im still on a 7300 and i use the waterfall but in a big pile it gets so cluttered its hard to tell whos who. maybe im not interpreting it right