so ive been chasing FT5XO for about three days now and kept getting absolutely nowhere. running a K3 into a 3el yagi at about 45ft, decent setup i thought, but just could not punch through. tried calling on top of everyone else like you do and just got buried every single time.

what finally worked — and i feel kinda dumb for not doing this sooner — was actually listening to where the DX was pulling people from. like really listening for 5-10 minutes before even touching the mic. i noticed the op was consistently coming back to stations that were calling slightly above where the bulk of the pileup was sitting. maybe 200-300hz up. so i just parked there and waited for a lull and got him on like the third call.

also started tail-ending more aggressively, not over the top of the previous QSO but just right as the contact was wrapping up. the split was 5 up to 10 and most guys were just spinning the dial to like 7 up and calling forever. i think there's a real advantage to watching where the DX is actually fishing rather than where everyone assumes he is.

curious if anyone else has noticed patterns like this or if it was just luck this time honestly

yeah this is basically the whole game with big pileups and most guys never figure it out. the DX op gets bored working the same slice of frequency over and over and drifts around, or they intentionally move to clear QRM. if you watch closely with a decent panadapter you can actually see where they're tuning between QSOs — there's usually a little jump in activity that follows them up or down the band.

the other thing that's helped me a ton is keeping calls short. like absurdly short. a lot of guys send their whole callsign two or three times plus a signal report nobody asked for. i just send my suffix once when i think the timing is right and a lot of the time that's enough for the DX to at least get a partial and come back. then you complete it from there. works way better on CW obviously but even on SSB just saying your call once clearly at the right moment beats yelling it repeatedly.

congrats on the contact btw, FT5XO was a nightmare pileup from what i heard

im still pretty new to chasing DX seriously so take this for what its worth but i spent an embarrassing amount of time just calling on the DX frequency itself before someone finally told me how split operation works lol. like nobody tells you this stuff when youre starting out. once i understood that and got a radio that could actually do proper split without the second VFO bleeding over i started actually making contacts.

the panadapter thing the other guy mentioned is huge too, i picked up an rx-only SDR just to watch the pileup while i transmit and even that cheap setup helped me understand what was happening way better than just listening could