Do you have a utility external to UT to help monitor your favorite servers? I have one that is useful because you can let it sit in your tray and it will play a sound if one of your favorites goes from no players to one or more players. I'll post instructions if you want to give it a try.
A. Download this:
http://www.birdieman.com/downloads/utServerMonitor291.zipB. Unzip it somewhere. No install, just run the utServerMonitor.exe
C. [OPTIONAL] If you already see your favorites in the list, skip down to D. If at this point you
don't see your favorites, it means it wasn't able to find your install directory, so you have to set it yourself. Do this using the menu System | Game INIs.
D. Open the menu Tools | Options. Set a value for the "Favorites Auto Refresh Rate" field.
E. [OPTIONAL] If you only want to monitor a single favorite (instead of all of the favorites), go to Tools | Options, and place a checkmark beside the field that reads "The favorites auto refresh only affects the selected server". Then you would make sure that the favorite you want to monitor is the one that is highlighted in the favorites list.
F. [OPTIONAL] You can change the sounds that are played by going to Tools | Sounds.
There is a bunch of other options and settings if you want to play around. There is also a thread for this utility at
http://www.birdieman.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1255886643We could see how well this works for catching each other.