best day to watch area 51

thinking about going to tikaboo on memorials day... two questions

1. will there be tons of other tourists on the mountain that day?

2. will the goverement even be working? since its a official holiday?

thanks i should have planned this earlier!

I am sure there will be a few people attempting the climb. The weather has been pretty cold at night recently, so I am sure with a three day weekend and warmer weather there will be some people around. Very rarely is there any activity at the base on the weekend. I know the Little A Le Inn is having a bbq on Saturday so there should be a few more people than a normal weekend at the gate and in Rachel.

reply to post by hiii_98


It is s federal holiday, so nothing will be happening there. Some people say federal holidays would be the perfect time to do a test since less people are at the base, but to that I reply the resources at the base should things go awry are also reduced. To perform a test, you need ATC, fuel services, runway crew, and crash crew. Maybe SAR.

If the intent is to watch a test at the base from Tikaboo, you need to pick a day where the moon rises in the early AM, That is, they don't do tests with moonlight present. There is no hard as fast rule regarding how to compute these days. My technique is I want a day when the period between two hours after local sunset to moon rise is at least 1 hour. Obviously if two hours before sunrise happens before moon rise, that sets your period. Basically, you want at least an hour of good darkness.

To make Memorial Day seem even a dumber day to go, recall that the first two weeks of June will be Fighter Weapons School Mission Employment, essentially graduation. So delaying a few days will mean much for range activity. On the other hand, the last two week of June generally have no Nellis activity, so Groom can use the range. And anything you hear on the scanner is more likely to be base related rather than Nellis related.

Hope you got your scanner. I will tweak my frequency list tonight and then post it.

Here is the frequency list. You need open office to read it. It does not include the Groom Lake frequencies since publishing them tends to cause them to get changed. [I don't think the base minds them being monitored since they must listen to their test flights and Janets being recorded, but publishing the frequencies could lead to intentional interference or worse yet spoofing.]

www.openoffice.org...
get you open office
open office

Nellis frequencies

www.lazygranch.com/temp/nellis_may_2010_public.ods

Hopefully one of those links will make it through.