so ive been meaning to get into LEO sat work for a while and last weekend i finally just did it. grabbed my FT-818 and the arrow antenna and went out in the backyard to catch an AO-73 pass. had gpredict running on the laptop with doppler correction feeding into the rig through hamlib which honestly took longer to set up than the actual operating did.

the thing that surprised me is how narrow the linear transponder actually feels in practice. i know on paper its like 40khz wide or whatever but when you factor in everyone piling on during a decent pass, finding a clear spot and actually holding your downlink frequency while manually adjusting the uplink for doppler is... a lot. my first pass i basically just listened and barely got a word out. second pass i managed one contact with a guy in germany which felt pretty great honestly.

biggest issue i ran into is that i keep drifting off my own downlink. like i find myself on the waterfall, start talking, and by the time i check again im wandering. is this a technique thing or is my setup just not compensating well enough? the hamlib doppler correction seemed to be working but maybe not perfectly. curious if others had this problem early on.

yeah the drifting issue is super common when you're starting out, dont feel bad about it. what most people figure out eventually is you want to anchor yourself to the downlink, not the uplink. like let the downlink frequency stay fixed in your head and adjust the uplink to chase it. if you set up hamlib right it should be doing most of that work but there's always a little residual error especially near AOS and LOS when the doppler rate is changing fastest.

also worth checking your VFO step size. if hamlib is correcting in big jumps it can sound fine on the waterfall but feel choppy. 100hz steps or smaller makes a big difference on a linear bird. AO-73 is pretty forgiving compared to some of the others, so if you're already making contacts on your second pass you're doing better than a lot of people who take weeks to get their first one.

the arrow antenna with an 818 is basically the classic setup, good choice. one thing i never see people mention is how much holding the antenna affects things physically, like if your arm gets tired mid pass and the antenna droops a bit you lose a couple db right when the pass is getting good. i started using a cheap camera tripod with an az/el mount i cobbled together and it helped way more than i expected even if it means running to repoint it every 30 seconds or so during a high elevation pass. anyway sounds like youre on the right track