so i've been meaning to get into satellite work for a while and last weekend i actually sat down and did it properly. been listening on the LEO birds for months but never actually transmitted. set up my FT-817 with a couple arrow antennas, one for 2m uplink and one for 70cm downlink, hand tracked the pass manually which was... an experience.

got a signal through on AO-73 which was exciting but the doppler correction is really messing with me. i understand the concept — satellite is moving so you have to constantly adjust — but in practice im trying to tune the downlink while also moving the antenna and also not tripping over the coax and its kind of chaos. is there any way to do this without a full Az/El rotor setup? i saw some people just use a fixed antenna pointed at like 20-30 degrees and catch part of the pass, wondering if thats viable for actually making contacts or just listening

also noticed my signal was way down compared to other stations, running about 3 watts on uplink. should that be enough or do i need more? dont want to be one of those guys who blasts 50 watts into a transponder and hogs the passband

3 watts is fine honestly, i work the linear birds with 5w most of the time and have no issues. the transponder on AO-73 isnt that power hungry and you really dont need much with a decent antenna. the guys running high power are usually the ones with bad antennas trying to compensate or they just dont know better. keep it low and you'll be a good neighbor on the passband.

for the doppler thing — yeah its a lot to juggle at first. what i did early on was just focus on the downlink doppler and let the uplink drift a bit. your signal will still get in, it just wanders around the passband a little. once i got a feel for the pass i started correcting both but it took maybe 10-15 passes before it felt natural. some guys use SDR# or gpredict with CAT control to automate the doppler but doing it manually is a good learning exercise first so you understand whats happening.

fixed antenna at low elevation does work for catching passes, ive done it from hotel rooms with a handheld yagi out a window. you lose the beginning and end of the pass but the middle 4-5 minutes near max elevation are usually the best anyway so its not terrible. wont be as productive as tracking but for casual contacts its workable.

yeah the chaos feeling is real, i remember my first few passes were basically just me frantically spinning around and missing everything. it gets better. one thing that helped me was just practicing the antenna movement during passes without even keying up, just get the muscle memory down for where the satellite is going to be.

gpredict is pretty much the go-to for tracking software if you havent already got it set up, and if you have a radio that supports CAT control it can handle the doppler automatically which is huge. changes the experience completely tbh