so i've been chasing VP6R for a couple days and kept getting nowhere, just buried in the pile every time. been licensed about 6 years and i'm running an IC-7300 into a 4-element yagi at about 40ft so its not like im working with nothing here. anyway i finally got through after changing up my approach and wanted to share what actually worked vs what didn't because i see a lot of bad advice floating around on this stuff.

first thing i stopped doing was calling on every single transmission. i know that sounds counterintuitive but the op on the other end is getting absolutely slammed and if you're just one of 300 guys all calling at the same moment you're basically noise. what i started doing was listening to where he was ending up in his rx window - he was working split obviously, listening up 5 to 10 - and i noticed he kept coming back to stations around 7-8 up. so i parked right around there and waited for a lull then called once, clean, just my callsign once. and he came back to me on the third try doing that.

the other thing that i think helped was actually slowing my keying down slightly. i run QSK and i had my sidetone monitoring on and realized my spacing between characters was getting sloppy when i was rushing. a perfectly sent callsign that cuts through once is worth more than a garbled one sent five times. the ops on these dxpeditions are usually pretty seasoned and they'll copy a clean call fast.

curious what other techniques people have had luck with, especially on the low bands where it gets even more chaotic

yeah the frequency drift thing in the pileup is real and most people dont pay attention to it. the dx op will subtly work his way up or down the listening window over time - either by habit or to shake off the lid who's been parking on the same freq for an hour - and if you're not tracking where his last few qsos actually ended up you're just guessing. i keep a notepad next to me and jot down the rx freqs he's actually pulling from. takes maybe 3-4 qsos worth of listening before you see a pattern.

also on 40 and 80 the noise floor situation changes everything. i've had much better luck timing my calls to hit just after the qsb peaks rather than trying to blast through at full power continuously. propagation is doing half the work for you if you're patient. the guys running legal limit and just hammering away all sound the same after a while, you gotta be different somehow.

great write-up though, the "call less often" thing is genuinely the hardest habit to break when you're amped up trying to get a new one

this is something ive been struggling with honestly. im only about a year into HF and pileups still feel like total chaos to me. i tried working a T8 station a few months back and just gave up after like 45 minutes cause i couldnt figure out what i was doing wrong. reading this helps a lot actually. one question - when you say you listened for where he was pulling from in the window, how are you monitoring that exactly? like are you just spinning the vfo up and down to find where callers are or is there a smarter way to do it with the panadapter?