so ive been chasing 3Y0 type stuff for years and just never had luck breaking through the big pileups, always felt like i was just shouting into the void. last week there was a decent DXpedition on from a pretty rare one in the pacific and i finally actually got through on 17m CW after like 45 minutes of trying different things so i figured id write up what actually worked vs what i thought would work going in

the big thing honestly was not transmitting on the DX frequency like obviously i knew about split operation but i wasnt really thinking about WHERE i was in the split window. i had been defaulting to listening for a gap and calling there but what ended up working was actually calling a bit higher in the split than where i heard most of the pile - like the operator was clearly walking up incrementally and i just sort of anticipated where they were heading rather than camping where the crowd was already thick

also running barefoot on a tribander was going nowhere, bumped up to the amp and it wasnt even about the extra power so much as the cleaner signal out of the linear, my barefoot signal was apparently a little broad from what someone told me later on the cluster. cleaned that up and suddenly i was at least being partially copied

anyone else have techniques that actually work consistently? the partial call thing where they come back with just part of your suffix - do you just send your full call or repeat the suffix? i always second guess myself on that

the partial call thing trips a lot of people up. when they come back with just a suffix fragment, send your full callsign once, maybe twice if conditions are rough but dont go hammering it over and over. the DX op knows what theyre doing, they got a partial and they want to confirm - just give them the whole call clean and wait. if you start sending just the suffix back you risk someone else with a similar suffix jumping in and stealing the QSO, happens all the time

on the split positioning thing youre completely right and honestly thats probably the most underrated skill in pileup breaking. reading which way the op is moving and getting ahead of the crowd. takes some experience to feel it out but once you start noticing the pattern in how a given operator works the pile its almost like a rhythm. some ops walk up 1 kHz at a time like clockwork, others are more random. the ones who jump around are harder obviously but if you can decode their pattern you're way ahead of the pack just camping on one frequency hoping to get lucky

yeah congrats on breaking through. i still strugle with this honestly. my main issue is timing - like i know i should wait for the dx to finish the previous QSO and then call but by the time i key up the pile is already halfway through transmitting and im just adding to the noise. do you use VOX or are you manually keying? im wondering if my VOX hang time is hurting me, there's probaly like 300ms of lag before i actually start transmitting and in a fast CW pileup that probably matters