so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly just HF stuff and a little 2m local but i finally decided to give the satellite thing a shot. got a cheap arrow antenna and my FT-818 and figured how hard can it be right

managed to track AO-73 last week using Gpredict on my laptop and i could actually hear the transponder which was exciting but i could never quite get my own signal through. i understand in theory that you need to adjust for doppler as the bird comes over but in practice im just fumbling around with the dial while trying to hold the antenna pointed at the right part of the sky and its a total mess

is there a way to lock the downlink frequency and just let it drift or do people really manually tune both the uplink and downlink simultaneously? i feel like i need three hands. also does it matter much which part of the pass i try, like high elevation only or can you work the low stuff too

yeah the doppler thing trips up basically everyone at first. what most people do when starting out is set the downlink on your receiver and just tune to keep the beacon or a signal centered, then adjust the uplink to match. once you hear yourself in the passband you kind of get a feel for it. for a linear transponder like on AO-73 the doppler shift at max approach is something like plus or minus 10 kHz on 2m so its not massive but its definitely noticeable over a full pass

the high elevation passes are definitely easier to start with, not because of doppler really but just because you have more time and the geometry is more forgiving with your handheld antenna. low elevation passes you might only have like a 4 or 5 minute window and half of it is fighting through trees or buildings. i'd say anything above 20 degrees is worth attempting when you're learning

also you might look at whether your 818 can do split VFO with a foot controller or something, some people rig up an interface to let Gpredict actually control the radio tuning automatically which takes the whole manual doppler problem off your plate. not necessary but nice once you get serious about it

honestly the arrow + 818 combo is pretty much the classic beginner satellite setup so youre in good company. i ran that exact thing for about a year before i bothered with any kind of computer control. the trick i used was to just chase the downlink by ear and not worry too much about where exactly my uplink was landing in the passband -- as long as you can hear yourself you know youre close enough and then its just fine tuning

one thing that helped me a lot was just doing a bunch of passes where i only listened and practiced keeping a signal centered before i tried to actually make a QSO. gets your hands doing the right thing automatically