so i finally decided to take the plunge and try working some of the linear transponder birds after watching a few youtube videos about it. picked up a cheap handheld yagi setup and been using gpredict on my laptop to track passes. my question is about the doppler correction because honestly i dont fully get how people manage to tune both uplink and downlink at the same time while also pointing the antenna and not fall over

like on AO-73 for example, the passband is only what, 30khz or so? and the doppler shift is way more than that over a full pass so if i'm not constantly retuning i'm going to be outside the transponder completely right? i've been using a FT-818 and just manually adjusting but it feels like i'm chasing my tail the whole time. is there some trick to this or do people just get used to it with practice? also does anyone run separate radios for uplink and downlink or is that overkill for a beginner trying to get their first contact

yeah the doppler thing on linear birds is genuinely the hardest part when you start out, most people dont realize how fast the frequency is shifting especially near AOS and LOS when the satellite is coming over the horizon at you. mid-pass when its more or less overhead the rate slows down quite a bit so that's usually the easier window to work

the trick a lot of people use is to tune the downlink to keep a signal in the passband and let that be your reference, basically forget about the uplink doppler for a moment and just make sure you can hear yourself in the transponder first. if you can hear your own signal come back you know you're in the right spot. two radios definitely helps but plenty of people do it single radio with a bit of mental gymnastics. gpredict can actually drive some rigs via CAT if your 818 supports it through a USB interface, that takes a lot of the pain away honestly

im in pretty much the same boat as you, been at it for about 3 months now. what helped me was just accepting that the first several passes are going to be garbage and treating it as practice for pointing the antenna rather than actually trying to make contacts. once the antenna tracking felt natural i had more mental bandwidth to deal with the tuning. still havent fully figured out the CAT control thing but just manually nudging the dial got easier over time, muscle memory i guess