so ive been chasing VP6R for about three days now and kept getting buried in the pileup every single time. tried the usual stuff, calling on his exact frequency, calling a little above, nothing. finally last night around 0200z i got him and figured id share what changed because honestly some of this surprised me.

first thing i did was actually stop calling for like 20 minutes and just listened. i know everyone says that but i mean really listened - figured out his split was moving around more than i thought, he wasnt just working 5 up consistently, he was sliding between 3 and 7 depending on where he was getting responses. once i mapped that out i started placing my calls about 1 khz above where he'd just worked the previous station.

second thing, and this felt counterintuitive, i dropped my power a bit. i run an amp and i think at full power my signal was just blending into the wall of noise he was hearing. went from 800w down to maybe 400 and cleaned up my audio with the processor backed off too. not sure if thats what did it or if it was just timing but it clicked.

also started sending my callsign just once instead of three times. read somewhere that the good ops actually prefer that because they can hear partial calls better when theyre not all overlapping. anyway it worked, he came back to me on the second try after i changed up. 17m SSB if anyone cares, propagation was actually decent that night.

the listening part is so underrated. i've watched guys in our club just hammer away for hours calling calling calling and never hear a thing. you gotta understand how the DXpedition op is actually working the pile before you can beat it. some of them have really distinct patterns - like they'll work by region, or they'll listen high for a few QSOs then swing low. if you catch that rhythm you can basically predict where to be.

the single callsign send thing is real too, especially on SSB. on CW its a bit different, sending twice can help but on phone if you're just a voice in a sea of voices, shorter and cleaner wins. ive also had luck just waiting for a slight lull - not complete silence but when the pile thins a little, maybe right after he works a run of europeans and they all back off slightly. thats your window and its usually only a few seconds.

one more thing - if the DXpedition is running FT8 in fox/hound mode thats a whole different ballgame and honestly a lot more about timing your transmit sequence than anything else. were you on SSB the whole time or did you try FT8 at all?

dropping power to cut through a pileup sounds weird but ive heard this before from a few serious DXers. the theory as i understand it is that on recieve end everything above a certain threshold just sounds like noise, so a slightly less loud but cleaner signal actually stands out more. never fully tested it myself but you're not the first person to say it worked.

congrats on the contact btw, VP6R is a good one