[EIDXA] ST0R

[Nelson Moyer]

I spent a few hours listening to the pileups on 17 RTTY and 20 CW this
afternoon. As usual, new entities bring out the hoards, cops, lids, jammers,
etc. I came away with both RTTY and CW QSOs, so I thought I'd share the
strategy that worked best under these circumstances. Find an open spot to
call. We here in the Midwest aren't going to overpower legal limit amps on
the East coast, so calling on the frequency of the last station worked isn't
productive. Move around to find those few elusive open spots, preferable in
the vicinity of the last call worked. Send CW at the speed the op is using,
in this case, 30 wpm. It helps to have dual receive, but it's not absolutely
necessary. The CW op was first rate, but he was coming back to partial calls
because the pileup was so deep. The K3 doesn't permit dual receive on
digital modes, at least if it does, I haven't figured out how to do it yet.
As a result of that and the fact that the RTTY pileup was compressed into 8
KHz, the RTTY Q was much harder than the CW Q. There usually weren't any
open spaces in the RTTY pileup today. The CW pileup was much larger and
spread over 14 KHz, but it was actually easier to break by listening and
calling in the open spaces near the previous call. The CW op was moving
around a lot and working up 3-13 KHz, using the entire split.

Good luck,
Nelson, KU0A