AmateurRadio.com

 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.