so i've been licensed about two years now and mostly just operate from home on my kenwood with a decent antenna setup, nothing fancy but it works. anyway a buddy of mine has been bugging me forever to try QRP and i finally caved and built one of those MTR kits last month, took me way longer than it should have because i kept second guessing my solder joints but i got it done.

took it out to a state park saturday, just a random summit not actually doing sota or anything, threw an end-fed up in a tree and spent about 3 hours on 20m. made 7 contacts which honestly felt like more of an accomplishment than making 50 contacts from home somehow. one guy in germany heard me running like 4 watts which still kind of blows my mind.

but here's the thing im confused about — i was having a hard time breaking pile-ups even small ones, and i noticed a lot of stations i could hear clearly just werent hearing me at all. is this just the reality of QRP or am i doing something wrong with how im calling? i tried tail-ending, waiting for a pause, sending my call a couple times... sometimes it worked sometimes nothing. wondering if there's a trick to it or if its just a numbers game at low power

welcome to the QRP world, its addicting isn't it. honestly what you're describing is just... QRP. that's kind of the deal. you're going to get into more pile-ups than you break, and some days the band just won't cooperate and you'll feel invisible. the guys who are really good at it learned to pick their spots — calling a station whos already worked down a pileup, or catching someone right when theyre tuning around and haven't got a big crowd yet.

tail-ending is good but timing matters a lot more at low power. you want to be the first call right after the dx finishes, not in the middle of everyone else. also dont send your call more than twice when youre calling in, it doesnt help and just clutters things up. one clean transmission with good spacing is better than rapid fire repeats. your antenna is doing a lot of the heavy lifting too — an end-fed up high and in the clear is going to outperform a lot of setups so youre already thinking right. seven contacts including europe on your first outing with 4 watts is genuinely a good day, dont let the ones that didnt hear you get to you

the germany contact at 4w is pretty awesome actually. i run a KX2 mostly and the pileup thing is real, you kind of learn to be patient and also a little strategic about it. one thing that helped me was finding stations that are calling CQ with no takers rather than chasing pile-ups. if someone is just calling CQ and nobody's answering, your 5 watts sounds the same as anyone else's 100w to them. also what time of day were you operating, 20m can be really different mid afternoon vs evening depending on where youre trying to hit