Quoting John Belstner who wrote on Sun 2014-08-03 at 12:18:
I heard lots of new calls on SO-50 today and I really wanted to give them a shout back and say welcome. Unfortunately, that's about all I heard was a bunch of folks throwing their call sign out.
I have avoided reporting from the European side of working SO-50 for a while, but this afternoon I heard multiple good QSO's and I could understand at least one callsign (M0SAT). I tried answering that callsign 2 times but no luck.
It was as busy as could be expected on a Sunday afternoon, but to me it sounded like everyone was acting fine and those who got across had nice and short QSOs (callsigns, signal, location).
On a more serious note, try to hear the downlink first before transmitting. It reduces QRM and greatly increases your chances of making a QSO!
You could miss your answer, the SO-50 downlink shift seems to me at the moment bigger than the input width of a normal FM amateur receiver. If I let gpredict do all the tuning from the specified downlink frequency I hear nothing. Tune around a bit and I find it and it's busy.
I just noted http://www.pe0sat.vgnet.nl/satellite/amateur-radio-satellites/so-50/ suggests not correcting for doppler shift on the 2M uplink. Any opinions on that?
Koos van den Hout PD4KH