The FT5ZM DXpedition

This DXpedition to Amsterdam Island has been showing up frequently in the spotting networks a lot lately. A lot of spotters have one complaint or other, about the FT5ZM operators or callers' bad behaviour of one type or another. So far, I haven't heard them well enough to try to call in the pileup - if I hear them at all.

When I saw an RTTY spot I though I might have a chance. I flipped over to the frequency but couldn't hear or decode anything, but I knew exactly when they were transmitting because they were operating split frequencies, and so the pileup would all transmit across a very wide spread of frequencies in synch with each other. Here's what it looked like.



The panadapter software isn't synched with the radio so while it appears to be on 10m it was actually on 20, but it was something to see this 40kHz-wide pandemonium break out every time FT5ZM called QRZ.