During yesterday’s activation of W2/GC-022, I had difficulty digging out EU chasers from the pile after I was spotted on 20M CW. My repeated requests for QRZ? EU ONLY were ignored by a handful of W,K, N and KC stations who continued to call. One stateside chaser sent his call FOUR TIMES on top of a weak F5 caller who eventually faded out. That US chaser later gave me a RST 579, so obviously heard my previous messages but apparently didn’t understand – or chose to ignore – my instructions. That was very frustrating. I didn’t know a 6-point summit was so priceless to some !!
In the future I plan to call “CQ DX” for extended periods to give everyone an equal chance.
Stay well & 73!
Mike, WB2FUV
It’s infuriating Mike. They do it because a) they think they are super important chasers and your directions do not apply to them or b) they don’t understand what EU ONLY means or c) they couldn’t hear you and were hearing the rest of the chasers to know when to send.
You need to chase up these people by emailing them and asking them why they were ignoring your directed calls to EU only. I can guarantee that the replies will be “sorry I couldn’t hear you properly” and some other feeble excuses. You can then decide whether you want to follow up with another email explaining if they can’t hear then they remain schtumm until they can.
In some cases the receipt of an email will improve their on-air standards for some time. In other cases, they have learned that if they are a complete pain in the butt, you will work them to get rid. Their poor and selfish operating gets results so they continue in this style.
You can’t put it down to inexperience, it’s a learned behaviour. There’s one guy who works me who is great on CW but on any voice mode he will ALWAYS call over the end of my QSOs when my partner is still transmitting to me. He knows exactly what is happening as he has been licenced for many years but has learned that this kind of selfish disruption will get him a QSO next in the pileup. But not from me. I’ll suffer his disruption just to make the selfish bugger wait.
Hello Mike, first to all TNX for QSO. I heard you strong and clear calling EU ONLY.
I answer these chasers who do not respect with NIL (Not In Log).some answer 5NN TU , but they are not in my log.
Be patient, 73
Hi Mike,
I heard your repeated calls for EU yesterday and I understand your frustration when those U.S. chasers kept calling you. That’s the same frustration I felt today during my activation when I asked for /P only and some few chasers kept calling and calling. No need to say they were not /P.
I suspect it’s because they just don’t listen to us activators and what we are saying, they just call when they hear a gap or when they hear others starting to call. Some just call although they don’t hear the activator, which strikes me as totally incomprehensible (some other more precise adjectives come to my mind to describe the way I feel about this behaviour but I won’t write them here to elude being banned by the moderator).
Maybe it’s just pure selfishness and that sort of ME and MYSELF FIRST attitude.
Well, it’s what we have in this World and we have to bear with all of them.
73,
This scenario is familiar if you’re a DX chaser! This happens daily many times. Many ops ignore the activator/dxpeditioner’s instructions and just keep calling. It’s really easy to see who’s doing it when the chased station is operating split so you can hear all the mess. It’s awful but as you say, Guru, it’s the way it is these days.
73,
John, K6YK
