so i've been chasing FT5/W for about 3 days now and kept getting buried in the pileup, tried everything i thought i knew and just kept getting walked over. my setup is nothing special, K3 into a 4el yagi at about 40ft, so i'm not exactly running a kilowatt into a stack of monobanders here.

what finally worked was stopping trying to call on top of everyone else and actually listening to where the DX was coming back. took me embarassingly long to figure out he was working a very tight 2-3 khz window split and wasn't moving around much at all. once i started picking the edges of where he was actually pulling calls from instead of just smashing my call in the middle of the pileup, i started getting through within like 4 or 5 calls.

also started sending my suffix only after i heard him end a qso, not my full call every time. i know thats pretty basic advice but i wasnt doing it and it made a noticeable difference. anyone else have techniques that actually work in a big pileup? feel like theres a lot of bad advice floating around about just running more power

yeah the suffix-only thing is huge and people underestimate it. when the dx op is pulling fragments out of the noise the last thing he needs is you sending your full callsign twice at 28wpm. just the suffix, clean, maybe once. and timing is everything honestly, listening to his rhythm before you even key up is worth more than any amount of extra watts. i ran a dx station during a small dxpedition to a pacific island a few years back and the stations that got through cleanest were almost never the loudest ones, they were the ones that were disciplined about when they transmitted. the guys running full legal limit with a 5el were sometimes harder to work because they were just on top of everything including each other and it turned into mush. one thing i'd add is if you can figure out the dx op is using a pattern like going by callsign district or region, just wait your turn. bucking the pattern is a waste of everyone's time and it annoys the op enough that some of them will specifically skip you.

im still pretty new to chasing dx seriously but one thing that helped me a lot was actually using the dx cluster smarter, not just spotting where the frequency is but reading the comments people leave about the split. sometimes someone will say "up 5 working NA" or whatever and that saves you a ton of time just hunting around. also i got burned once calling simplex on a split operation because i didnt read carefully enough, felt like an idiot when someone came back and told me lol. still learning the etiquette side of it tbh