On Mar 9, 2013, at 9:21 AM, Dick Wilson wrote:
> Try to find stations being worked. Listen to see who/ what call areas
> are getting through. Is there a pattern? Does the op change frequency
> with each Q? Up or down a little, maybe. Putting your signal close, but
> not exactly on frequency of last station worked may set your signal in
> the (relative) clear.
Strategies change with passing time.
Not that many years ago, perhaps about 2004, if you have two receivers and one
of them has a RTTY waterfall tuning, you were king. You point one receiver at
the DX and use the waterfall on a second transceiver to look for the station he
is working.
With that, you can find his QSX much faster than the knob turners. Especially
so when the people who work the DX are experienced ops and reply with nothing
more than a 599 and their callsign. That station would be worked even before
the knob turner can move his knob, much less centered his transmitter on the
QSX.
When properly equipped, you can pounce on that QSX, and most of the time the DX
will copy you alone when he listens again. It was the only way for a 100 watt
and vertical station like mine could work DX (I used it with CW also). Even
for a puny station, it was almost like shooting fish in a barrel. If you have
a kilowatt and a beam, it is like shooting fish in a barrel.
(Before that, only two strategies had worked for me -- one was to catch the DX
before it appears on packetcluster, and the other was to wait for propagation
to fade for the rest of North America and only the west coast were left hearing
the DX.)
Then the FlexRadio era arrived. More people were applying the
transmit-on-the-previous-QRX technique. When the DX listens again, there is
now always a big pile. So the next strategy is to find a hole next to the
previous QSX, which fortunately a waterfall will also do for you.
People learned how to do that too... so today, the pile became wider instead of
at one frequency.
There are DXeditioners like DL2RUM who use waterfall tuning. And with them,
you can find any hole within 1 kHz or 2 kHz from where his receiver is centered
at and he will find you. The hold does not have to be right next to where he
just worked. There are YouTube videos of Tom doing just that, jumping to a
clear signal with a click of a mouse when the pile at the frequency he was
listening to became so unruly that he could not pick out a single callsign.
You can also see that Tom did not move his receive VFO for at least the
durations of those videos. If you called Tom 5 kHz away from where he last
worked a station, he will never hear you.
I suspect that before long (perhaps even within the year), DXpeditioners will
start using skimmers (it would increase their rate by quite a lot, so there is
a reason ($$$) for them to do so). With that, and proper logging software,
they do not even have to do any waterfall clicking. Simply click on any
recognizable callsign on his screen and send an exchange. The DX need not know
what frequency the callsign printed from, so the skimmer display can be made
much cleaner for DXpedition purposes.
When that time comes, working DX is a matter of simply finding a hole, any
hole, within the band spread of his skimmer. Except for avoiding QRM, there is
no skill needed whatsoever to work DX. And you need not be loud if the skimmer
has a decent demodulator with good dynamic range -- your text will be picked up
even if there are some horrendously loud stations (as long those guys don't
transmit with dirty FSK or have transmitters with terrible phase noise).
The DXpedition's duty cycle gets close to 100% -- he immediately responds to
the first call sign that prints in the skimmer, and even be able to string a
dozen exchanges one after another without a CQ or QRZ in between, with the
skimming software queuing up a bunch of callsigns.
73
Chen, W7AY
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