so ive been trying to figure out the best setup for when i do portable/sota style stuff on 2m and 70cm and i keep going back and forth on this. right now i have a decent 5 element yagi for 2m that i built from a design i found a few years back, works great, but obviously nothing for 70cm except my rubber duck which is basically useless above like a mile or two.

been looking at those dual band yagis where they interleave the elements for both bands on the same boom. the M2 LEO pack comes up a lot and ive seen the cheap chinese knockoffs on ebay too. my question is whether the compromise you make on both bands by doing the dual band thing is actually noticeable in practice or if its one of those things that only matters on paper. i mostly do satellite work and some local rag chews when im up on a summit, not contesting or anything super serious.

also debating whether i should just pack both antennas and deal with the extra weight/setup time. theyre not that heavy individually but when youre hiking a few miles it starts to add up. anyone actually use one of these dual band yagis regularly and have thoughts?

i have the M2 LEO pack and honestly for satellite work its perfectly fine. yeah if you put it on a vna and compare it to a dedicated antenna on each band you'll see the dual band isnt quite as clean but in actual use i havent noticed it being a problem. AO-91 and AO-92 work fine, linear sats are a bit more challenging but thats more about the antenna pointing than the yagi itself.

the bigger thing for me was just having one antenna to deal with during a pass. trying to swap antennas mid-pass while also running the radio and tracking the satellite manually is a headache. one dual band beam connected to a duplexer and youre just focusing on operating. for casual sota satellite work id say go dual band and dont overthink it.

I built a cheap tape measure yagi for 2m years ago and it works shockingly well for the weight, so that might be worth looking into if you havent already. For 70cm you can do the same thing, the elements are just shorter so its even lighter. Two separate tape measure yagis probably weigh less than one commercial dual band unit and you can tune each one properly.

That said if youre doing satellites the duplexer thing the other guy mentioned is a real consideration. Juggling two antennas during a 10 minute pass sounds like a nightmare. Ive never done satellite myself so take that with a grain of salt but it seems like it would be a problem.