Mark,
A few months have passed since this discussion. Based on activity I have seen since that time, it appears that L/V activity on the Tuesday nights and Wednesday mornings dropped, compared to the previous schedule on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. The only times I saw activity that approached the previous weekend schedule were around Christmas and New Year's Day which fell on Wednesdays.
I think it is appropriate to consider moving the L/V activity back to weekends. There are many with new IC-9700s that might have an easier time trying L/V on a weekend, rather than a late weeknight or a weekday morning, along with others trying all sorts of combinations of radio and antenna for the 1.2 GHz uplink. I'm still enjoying the Alinco DJ-G7T HT with a 10-element Yagi for my L-band uplink, sometimes dropping from 1W "high power" on that band to 300mW.
As for the previous experimenter's activities on AO-51... those ran for a week at a time. After AO-40, I think running those different modes for a week at a time on an LEO satellite like AO-51 was better than simply scheduling one day a week. You and Drew may have had to put AO-51 into a mode like V/S, and then put the satellite back into its normal mode, where AO-92 automatically switches from L/V to U/V after 24 hours. I enjoyed V/S in those days, even with the need to adjust for Doppler on the 2.4 GHz downlink almost constantly for 10 to 15 minutes, along with the cross-mode V/U where we had to transmit in SSB or CW to be heard on the FM downlink. I worked a couple of stations one year during Straight Key Night on AO-51 that way.
73!
Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/ Twitter: @WD9EWK or http://twitter.com/WD9EWK
On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 12:37 PM Mark L. Hammond marklhammond@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for pointing out some things for consideration, Patrick and others. There is, naturally, a long list of pros/cons for any day we might choose. I seem to have good memories about AO-51 (a LEO) experimenter's nights--and it seems like it was usually a Tuesday night event? Anyhow, no matter when we schedule, we'll have conflicts. What we'll do is run an experiment, on Experimenter's night! Effective this week, we'll switch AO-92 L/v operations from Sat/Sun to Tues/Wed, and run it that way for a few months. Then we'll reevaluate to see if it makes sense to keep it on Tues/Wed or switch to another night.
Hopefully this will change it up enough that some who could NOT attempt L-band on our usual schedule due to conflicts, might now be able to give it a shot!
73,
Mark N8MH