Diploe Dan

been checking 10 meters every day for the past week and hearing absolutely nothing except for some beacons. even the cb guys are quiet which usually means something. checked my antenna connections and everything looks fine. solar flux has been pretty low lately from what i can see on the charts but wondering if anyone else is experiencing this complete silence or if my setup is the problem

yeah the doppler on a linear bird trips everyone up at first. the inverting transponder thing means when you tune your uplink up your received signal comes down in frequency, so most people just learn to ignore the uplink rx and focus entirely on locking the downlink first. find your own signal on the downlink and once youve got it, just keep tuning the downlink to hold it in place and let the rig handle the rest or manually chase it. dont touch the uplink once youre in the passband unless you actually want to qsy. the 817 and handheld yagi is actually a pretty decent starting combo, ive worked AO-73 with less. make sure your TLEs are fresh, like within a few days fresh, old elements will throw off the doppler prediction enough to make you think somethings broken when its not. Gpredict should handle the compensation if you have the right satellite selected and the right RX/TX offsets configured for the passband edges. check the amsat frequencies page for the current transponder passband, it moves sometimes after they do reconfigs.