Finally, it has started to warm up here and on Saturday temps hit a nice 7C, and we celebrated by burping the house. It ended up raining all day, but that helps melt the snow faster which is ok with me. I was in the radio room doing some this and that, I decided to check (again) the DX Heat cluster and see what if anything was going on with 3Y0K on Bouvet island. As way of background I have seen them many times on the cluster followed by a huge pile up but never could hear them.
As I was looking over the spots on the cluster 3Y0K just popped up with a new spot on 20m. I flipped the switch on the 7610 and ventured down to there spotted frequency on 20m. For the first time I could hear them at about S3, even better there was next to no pileup.....YET! The Icom 7610 was on CW, I tapped Dual then split and joined the fray.
In the right ear I could hear the pileup and was looking at the waterfall to see where the lonely signal was who answered 3Y0K's beck and call. Very fast I caught on to how they were working the pileup. One issue was 3Y0K would reach out to a caller BUT still many would continue to send their call sign. Once 3Y0K worked a station many like me have a waterfall display and could see were the action was. Then all of a sudden that small wedge of the frequency became very busy. What I noticed was 3Y0K moved down frequency a bit more than normal to get away from the clump of callers. I decided to do the same. I noticed that 3Y0K now had moments of fading in and out, also the pileup was starting to grow fast. But after only 3 tries I was in the log.
During my attempt there were those calling on 3Y0K's frequency, someone for about 30 seconds or more sending a carrier over top of 3Y0K and those who just sent their call continually no matter who 3Y0K was working. Oh well just part of the fun I guess.
3 comments:
Congrats on getting them logged - was this an ATNO for you? I remember the days when I was just getting into SDR radios like the Flex and the Anan...back then, not too many people had bandscopes and I had a significant advantage over them with e my rigs. All gone now though since most serious DXers do have a way of seeing the "right place" to call in the pile-up.
73,
John
Nice job! 73 de Jeff KE9V
Well done Mike, I wish I had an IC-7610 for that. I've tried working 3Y0K on CW a few times now and try the same as you. Although I cannot do the same tricks with the 7300. I view the waterfall but unable to see or hear the signal coming back to 3Y0K. So I just tried to call on a free frequency when everyone is calling. Not the best strategy. I've worked them on 10m SSB today. And yes I did hear the opposite stations but it didn't help much. I finally took another approach after I heard they could be listening as far as 50KHz up. So I called 50KHz (!) up. And it took me only 3 calls to get in the log then... 73, Bas
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