so ive been chasing a pretty rare one for a while now, not gonna say which entity cause its still somewhat active but anyway the point is i finally broke through after like 3 days of trying off and on. figured id write up what ended up working since most of the advice i see online is either super generic or just says 'be patient' which yeah thanks very helpful.

the big thing that changed for me was stopping the tail-ending. i know everyone says tail-end works sometimes but for this particular op it was clearly not what they wanted and they were skipping anyone who did it. once i started listening for the full pattern of who they were working, like really listening for a few minutes before transmitting, i could tell they were kind of working up the band in small increments. so i started parking just a bit above where they seemed to be finishing each qso and it paid off.

also split discipline made a huge difference. i was initially transmitting too close to their rx freq and just blending into the blob. moved up about 3khz more than i normally would and got a partial on the next call. then a full call two tries later. total time from that adjustment maybe 8 minutes which felt like nothing compared to the previous days.

the other thing and this is more of a station thing, i dropped my power slightly and slowed down my keying a bit. i run an IC-7610 and i think i had the keyer speed cranked way up out of habit from contesting. the DX op was clearly pulling out calls better when they were at a more moderate speed, i could hear him come back cleaner on the slower guys.

anyway thats about it, nothing revolutionary but it clicked for me this weekend. curious if anyone else has found the split distance thing to be that significant or if it depends on the op

yeah the split distance thing is real and people massively underestimate it. ive noticed on a lot of expeditions the op will actually announce something like 'listening 5 to 10' and half the pileup still transmits at plus 1 or 2. so even if you follow instructions you're already ahead of a huge chunk of callers. on the bigger dxpeditions with multiple ops they often have a dedicated guy just listening and logging where the pileup density is and they steer the working op away from the blob. so moving around within the announced range is actually a legit tactic, not just random.

the keyer speed thing is interesting, i hadnt thought about it that way but it makes sense. a lot of pileup ops are running SO2R or at least have split attention and they're copying calls fast with a lot of qrm so giving them a clean readable signal at reasonable speed probably does help. i tend to run my speed faster than i should out of habit too.

what band were you on, if you dont mind? that changes things quite a bit in terms of how the pileup behaves

tail ending is kind of a controversial one, ive heard experienced ops say it works great and others say it just annoys the dx op. probably depends on the op and the conditions honestly. i tried it on a caribbean operation a few months back and got nowhere, switched to just calling cleanly right after and got through in maybe 5 minutes. so anecdotally your experience matches mine.

one thing i havent seen mentioned much is tx audio. i spent a while dialing in my mic eq and compression settings on my radio and i genuinely think it helped on ssb pileups. not over-compressed but enough presence that the call cuts through a bit. on cw its all about clean keying and not having a chirpy signal obviously.