Made it out for my 5th attempt at an exchange on AO-85. However, it was most disappointing in as much as a Ham in Southern California dominated the bird for a full 7 minutes of my pass; if the ham had been whipping out contacts I would not be objecting. Instead, this ham was busy being Mr. Chatty and I think had no more than two separate conversions. Discussions included some radio talk but also expanded out into promotion of a ham fest and discussion of mutual friends. While I have not worked birds since 2012, I know that this type of behavior was frowned upon back then and for good reason. When we go to the trouble to get our equipment into a location where we have a good clear line of sight and then only a limited window folks need to move along with just an exchange of call sign and maybe throw in the grid square if traffic permits. This was not my first experience with this single ham hogging the time.
I am still without a contact and trying to figure out uplink freq. Today, I took another hand held down with the downlink freq dialed in. The only two of my uplink attempts that caused a squawk out of the second radio was when I was on 435.175 (not narrow band) just past the Max El, which was also just after the disappearance, at last, of Mr. Chatty. Frankly, I am not sure when I will bother again; not worth the time and effort when I have to waste so much of the time with a Mr. Chatty hogging time, while still trying to dial everything in.
On the other hand, I do welcome any uplink suggestions RE both frequency and whether or not going with narrow band that anyone might have; previously, the only input I received was from a ham in Hi (thank you). 73 Tim CrawfordKE7TAC