so ive been trying to work FO-29 for a few weeks now and i can hear signals on the downlink just fine, pretty clear when the pass is decent elevation, but i cannot for the life of me find my own uplink signal in the passband. running about 5 watts into a pair of hand-held yagis, uplink on 145.9xx and listening down around 435.8xx depending on doppler. i know the transponder is inverting so USB up means LSB down or whatever but i keep second-guessing myself mid-pass and then the satellite is already gone

my bigger problem is probably the doppler correction honestly. im just doing it manually by ear which i know is kind of a mess. i have gpredict running on the laptop but im not feeding it to the radio, just glancing at it while trying to hold the antennas and tune and talk all at once. its a lot. is there a way to simplify this or am i just in for a rough learning curve until i get muscle memory for it

also not sure if my uplink power is even close to enough, i see people say 5w is fine but then also see people say you need a yagi with decent gain or youre wasting your time. mine are the arrow antenna so at least thats sorted i think

the inverting transponder thing trips everyone up at first, dont feel bad. so yeah USB on uplink gives you LSB on downlink, and the doppler correction runs opposite directions on the two bands simultaneously which makes manual tuning genuinely difficult especially on a low pass. what a lot of people do starting out is just pick a spot in the passband and tune the downlink to find themselves rather than trying to hit a specific frequency. transmit for a second, sweep the downlink slowly, repeat. you'll eventually hear yourself and then you know where you are.

the arrow is totally fine for power, 5w into that thing should get you in. the issue is more likely the doppler. even being 5-10khz off means you could be hunting in the wrong part of the band entirely. if you cant automate it yet at least pre-calculate the doppler offset for the midpoint of the pass and start there, gpredict shows you this. honestly once you hear yourself that first time it all clicks and the passes after that get way easier

yeah i had the exact same situation when i started on linear birds, holding the arrow and trying to tune is basically a three-handed job. what finally helped me was just setting up a small folding table outside so i could at least put the laptop somewhere and not be completely juggling everything. sounds dumb but it made a real difference. also i taped a doppler cheat sheet to the table for FO-29 with the rough correction values at AOS, mid-pass, and LOS so i wasnt staring at gpredict the whole time

the other thing — and this took me embarrassingly long to figure out — is that if you hear a carrier or signal in the passband that drifts opposite to what you'd expect, thats you. the inversion means your transmitted signal moves the wrong direction relative to ground-based stations which is confusing when youre monitoring your own downlink