I had off from work yesterday and spent a little time on the radio starting in the late afternoon. One of the hardest areas for me to make a contact with is with Asia and the Middle East. Yesterday I was able to log 2 Middle East countries for the first time. I also worked some other DX as well.

E4X is the call for a DXpedition to Palestine. They have been on the air for a few days but if I heard them at all, they were weak and the pileups were big. Yesterday I just tuned to various bands/modes as they were spotted and listened until I was able to hear them just enough to make out my call if they came back. 17m SSB seemed like a good shot yesterday but they never heard me before I couldn’t hear them any longer. On 20m CW I spent a lot of time sending my call and when I heard DSL come back over the noise at 2137z, I sent my call again and heard K2DSL completely so I returned with TU 5NN K2DSL and heard TU back.  They weren’t strong and there is a lot of QRM from stations not transmitting up the band as they should so I couldn’t be sure until I woke up this morning and checked the online logs and sure enough K2DSL is shown as working them on 20m CW. Woohoo!!! I will try and work them on phone and RTTY too if I can over this weekend as they start to wrap things up.

A couple hours later I saw a spot for JY4CI in Jordon on RTTY and I could hear him ok so I started to send out my call. He had a pileup as well and he was working stations but I could hear him well enough on 20m. After a short while I saw K2DSL come across the screen so I sent back his report and saw his TU which also contained K2DSL. I emailed him at his QRZ.com address to make sure before I sent so $ to him for a QSL card and short time later he confirmed via email I was in his log and that he was running 35w. I’ll be sending off a QSL card to Rafiq for sure!

Besides these 2 new DXCCs I worked VP8LP in the Falkland Islands on 17m SSB and FO8RZ in French Polynesia in the South Pacific on 12m RTTY. I caught FO8RZ just before he said he was QSYing to 17m so I flipped to 17m, found him and was his first contact after he switched bands.

Definitely a good DX Day!
K2DSL