Nine new ones on 30 metres thanks to a big pile-up

I visited the shack of Thos EI2JD on Friday afternoon for a bit of work on the bands. He posed a question to me which was very interesting: "What band do you most need countries on?" Apart from 10 metres, which was pretty dead at the time, the next "busy" band which I most needed to build up countries on was 30 metres. So we connected up his 30m vertical to the antenna switcher and loaded the amp for 400 watts and I started CQing - in CW mode of course.

Within a few moments I was already getting attention. So much so, in fact, that after working just one contact I had a big pile-up. So, for the first time ever, I was able to call "EI2KC UP" and split so that I was listening up one KC from where I was transmitting. In this case I was TX on 10.107 and RX on 10.108. The pile-up was sustained and loud and so I worked them quickly with just their callsign and 5NN (599). In the space of about an hour and a half I worked 145 QSOs. It was great fun. The pressure was intense at times, especially where I was trying to pull a quiet one out of the QRM and someone would keep calling over them.

The total new countries worked in that time was nine. 

Once again, thanks to Thos for the use of his station!

Here are the latest band standings with me:

160M: 27 DXCCs worked (+14)
80M: 60 (+5)
40M: 109 (+6)
30M: 78 (+13)
20M: 130 (+1)
17M: 104
15M: 90 (+7)
12M: 65 (+23)
10M: 35 (+4)
6M: 53
2M: 10