so ive been trying to work FO-29 for the past few passes and im getting nothing useful out of it. running an ft-847 with a pair of yagis, az/el rotor setup, and i do have doppler correction running through gpredict which usually works fine for me on other sats. the uplink is 145.900-146.000 and downlink 435.800-435.900 if i remember right, inverting transponder obviously so i flip the sidebands.

i can sometimes hear what might be a carrier but its way down in the noise and im not even sure if thats the sat or just interference from somewhere. ive worked FO-29 maybe a dozen times before so its not like im totally new to this. just wondering if anyone has checked it recently and knows if the transponder is actually active or if im chasing a ghost. also my doppler offsets might be slightly off - i recalculated the keplerian elements yesterday from celestrak but who knows.

any thoughts appreciated, getting a little frustrated here

FO-29 has been pretty inconsistent lately, its not just you. the transponder goes in and out depending on battery condition and solar angle - there are stretches where it just wont activate at all for days at a time. i had a great pass with it about two weeks ago but nothing usable since then. worth checking amsat's status page if you havent already, sometimes someone posts an observation report that'll tell you if the bird is even awake.

one thing i noticed is that the transponder seems to behave better on passes that go high elevation, like above 40 degrees or so. low horizon passes ive almost never gotten anything. your setup sounds fine honestly, ft-847 is pretty much the gold standard for this kind of thing and if gpredict is feeding doppler correctly youre doing everything right. might just be timing and sat health at this point.

yeah the elements matter a lot more than people think - ive had gpredict show a pass thats like 3 seconds off from reality because i was using elements that were like 10 days old and on a low pass that threw off my pointing enough to miss the window. celestrak is good but i try to grab fresh ones every couple days for the LEOs im actively chasing. also double check youre set to the right mode in gpredict for the transponder, theres been a couple times i had it set wrong and the doppler correction was going the wrong direction which is a fun kind of chaos to troubleshoot lol