so ive been chasing FT5/W for like three weeks now and kept getting nowhere, just wall to wall calling and the DXpedition just wasnt hearing me at all. tried everything i thought i knew and nothing. my signal is decent, running about 500w into a 4-el yagi at 45 feet so its not like im a little pistol station or anything.

what finally worked was a combination of things i hadnt really put together before. first i stopped trying to call on or near the freq everyone else was piling on. i started listening really carefully to where the DX was actually coming back to — not just where people were calling, because those two things can be pretty different especially if they're running split and moving their RX around. once i figured out he was consistently pulling guys out from about 3-4 up i just parked there and waited for a gap. second thing was i cut my message down to just my suffix, WB8 and then just my suffix. felt weird but the moment i heard a partial that sounded close i came back fast with full call.

also turned off the pre-amp which sounds backwards but i think it was actually helping the noise floor eat some of the weaker return signals i was trying to identify. not sure if that made a difference but i was grasping at straws at that point lol. anyway worked him on 17m CW after like 4 days of trying and it felt pretty great. curious if anyone else has had luck with tricks that arent super obvious

the split listening thing is huge and honestly most people never figure it out. the DX op is almost never sitting still on their receive end, especially on a busy band — theyre sweeping around or working a pattern and if you just camp on the same freq as everyone else youre basically invisible. ive had good luck just watching the cluster spots AND ignoring them at the same time if that makes sense. spots tell you the split exists but they go stale fast and the herd just piles on whatever split the last guy posted.

one thing i'd add is timing your call relative to when the DX finishes a QSO. theres usually a brief moment where the pileup thins just slightly because everyone's waiting to hear the next callsign going out. thats your window. not right when he sends QRZ, more like just a hair before the next QRZ when the pileup is winding down from the previous call. hard to describe but once you hear it a few times you know what i mean. the 4-el at that height should be doing fine on 17, preamp thing is interesting, i could see that being a real factor if youre in a noisy environment and the AGC is working against you

yeah the suffix only thing took me forever to accept because it feels so wrong when youre used to always giving your full callsign. but on a massive pileup the DX op really is just listening for unique sounds and your suffix is what sticks out. KD9 whatever, every KD9 prefix sounds the same in a crowd. also heard that some experienced ops will slightly offset their TX freq by maybe 50-100hz even within the split window to stand out acoustically from the wall of carriers — never tried it myself but the idea makes sense to me i guess. congrats on the FT5 that ones been on my list for ages