so ive been wanting to get into satellite work for a while now and finally just decided to jump in with SO-50 since everyone says its a good starting point. got my ft-817 and a arrow antenna and went out in the backyard last night for a pass that was supposed to be like 47 degrees max elevation, figured that was decent enough to try.

problem is im totally lost on the doppler correction thing. i understand the concept, frequency shifts as the bird approaches and then moves away, fine. but in practice when im out there holding the arrow and trying to manually tune the radio at the same time its just chaos. i was on 145.850 for the uplink and 436.795 for the downlink and i could hear what i think was the transponder or maybe just noise honestly, but i couldnt get a contact.

do most people just memorize the doppler curve ahead of time and manually tune by feel, or is there some way to automate this on the 817? ive seen people mention gpredict but i havent figured out how to get that talking to the radio yet. also not sure if my antenna polarization was right, i had it horizontal the whole time

yeah the first few passes are just a mess, dont get discouraged. SO-50 is FM so the doppler correction is actually pretty forgiving compared to working a linear transponder, you dont need to be super precise, maybe just nudge the downlink every 30 seconds or so during the pass and you'll be fine. the uplink you barely need to touch honestly.

the polarization thing though — try rotating the arrow as you go, most guys do a kind of slow twist during the pass. the signal fades in and out with polarization and you can really tell the difference when you hit the right angle. gpredict is worth getting set up with CAT control eventually but for SO-50 just do it by hand first and get a feel for the pass geometry before you add more variables. once you hear a contact come back to you youll wonder why you thought it was hard

i went through the exact same thing a few months ago lol. what finally helped me was just running gpredict on my laptop next to me with the doppler display up so i could at least see roughly where i should be, even without CAT control its useful just as a reference. also 47 degrees is a solid pass, you should definitely be hearing traffic on it. if you were only getting noise i wonder if maybe you had uplink and downlink swapped or something? i did that embarrisingly long time before i caught it