so i've been meaning to try LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally got off my ass and set up to try AO-73. been doing terrestrial SSB and some HF for years so im not totally lost but satellite is definitely a different animal.

i've got a yaesu FT-818 which everyone says is fine for this, a cheap arrow antenna, and i'm using gpredict on my laptop for tracking. the pass came over around 1430 local and i could hear signals but i couldn't really tell if i was getting through or not. i know you have to correct for doppler manually on the 818 which is kind of a pain - was adjusting the uplink while trying to keep the downlink frequency stable and it was just a mess honestly.

also the linear transponder thing - i get the concept, you go in on one band and out on the other, but i noticed the passband seemed pretty narrow, like signals were stepping on each other constantly. is that normal for AO-73 or was that just a busy pass? and does everyone just deal with the doppler manually or is there some trick i'm missing with the 818 specifically?

yeah the passband on AO-73 is only like 40kHz so when its a good pass over a populated area it gets pretty crowded. linear transponders are inverting too so thats another thing to get used to - LSB on the uplink comes out as USB on the downlink. a lot of guys get caught off guard by that the first few times.

for doppler with the 818 youre kinda stuck doing it by ear unless you rig something up with software. some people use two radios - one locked for RX and tune the TX side. others just accept itll be a bit rough and focus on keeping their downlink signal in the passband. honestly for a first attempt hearing anything at all is the real win. try a lower elevation pass sometime, the geometry is actually easier to work with than a high overhead one where doppler rate changes faster near AOS and LOS.

gpredict is great but have you looked at whether you can feed doppler corrections into the radio via CAT? i know the 818 supports CAT control and theres a way to have gpredict or a script handle the frequency shifting automatically. i havent done it with an 818 specifically but ive seen it work really slick with other rigs. might be worth digging into before your next pass instead of trying to hand-tune it in real time because that really is just chaos, especially when youre also trying to point the arrow and not look like a complete weirdo in the backyard.