so ive been chasing VP6R for a few days now and finally got them in the log last night on 17m SSB. wanted to share what ended up working because honestly i tried a bunch of stuff before something clicked.

first couple days i was just calling with everyone else, timing it pretty much the same as the herd, and getting nowhere. the DX station was working split, listening up 5 to 10, and i kept landing in the same spot as like 50 other stations. classic mistake i guess.

what finally worked — i started really listening to where the op was actually pulling calls from. not just the frequency they said, but watching the pattern. he kept drifting to the upper end of his listening range and most people were still piled up at the low end. so i moved up to like +9 and suddenly he was coming back to stations near me. took maybe 4 or 5 tries and he got me.

also i noticed he had a pattern in how long he listened before moving on. once you figure out when he's about to move to a new call you can time your TX to land right at the start of his listening window. not sure if thats a thing people talk about but it seemed to help. running 500w into a 4el yagi at 45ft, nothing exotic, mid-tier setup i guess. just patience and actually listening before transmitting.

yeah the frequency pattern thing is huge and most people completely ignore it. i've worked a lot of rare ones over the years and honestly the single biggest mistake i see is stations just calling blind into the middle of the split without ever actually listening first. you can almost always figure out where the DX op is fishing if you spend 5 minutes watching instead of calling.

the timing thing you mentioned is real too. experienced DX ops tend to have a pretty consistent rhythm — they listen for roughly the same amount of time each QSO, and if you learn to call right at the top of that window when they're freshly listening you stand way better odds than calling in the middle when they've probably already zeroed in on someone. i use a second receiver sometimes just to monitor the DX station's TX frequency while im searching the split, helps a lot with timing. congrats on VP6R, that ones a solid catch.

nice one. i still havent worked them, been trying on 40m CW mostly but my antenna situation is not great right now. got the dipole at like 25ft which is fine for local stuff but when youre competing against kilowatt stations with stacked yagis its rough lol. might try 17m SSB like you did, maybe less competition there depending on the time. what time were you getting in when propagation was good to your location?