so ive been at this for about three weeks now and i finally got a decent pass with AO-73 last night but the whole doppler thing is way harder to manage than i expected. i have a ft-817 for downlink and a cheap handheld for uplink which i know isnt ideal but its what i got right now. the pass was like 8 minutes and i spent probably the first 4 minutes just trying to hear myself in the passband let alone actually work anyone.

im using gpredict for tracking and i had it set up to do the doppler correction automatically through CAT but it was only correcting the downlink, not the uplink obviously since the HT doesnt do CAT. so im manually tuning the uplink while also trying to adjust the downlink and hold the yagi and its just a lot happening at once. anyone have a good workflow for this or do i just need to practice more? also wondering if i should flip which radio does which job but i think you want the better rig on downlink right?

yeah the dual-vfo dance on LEOs with linear transponders is genuinely tricky at first, dont feel bad about it. most people struggle for the first dozen passes or so. the thing that helped me most was learning to pre-tune the uplink slightly ahead of where you think you need to be at the start of a pass and then just slowly walk it down as the pass progresses rather than constantly chasing it. AO-73's inverting transponder means if you tune up on uplink the signal goes down in the passband so thats another layer to keep track of.

as for which radio on which end, yeah keep your better rig on downlink, 100%. the downlink signals are weak enough that you want every bit of sensitivity you can get. the uplink is more forgiving as long as youre not blasting too much power and you're in the passband. what kind of yagi are you running?

honestly the handheld on uplink situation is rough, i did the same thing for a while. what finally helped me was just printing out a doppler correction chart for a typical pass and taping it near my operating position so i at least had a rough idea of where to be without staring at gpredict the whole time. its not perfect but it frees up a lot of mental bandwidth. also some people program like 5-10 memory channels into the HT with the uplink frequency at different points in the pass. kind of old school but it works better than you'd think when you're also juggling everything else.