In article .com,
Terl wrote:

| First you need a radio capable of 'full-duplex'(capable of hearing the
| downlink while transmitting on the uplink), other wise you'll just add
| to the qrm.

It's hardly essential. It's nice, but not essential. After all, most
people work the local repeaters without doing full duplex. Of course,
in that case, the repeater is usually not 200+ miles away, and
probably has 1000 watts instead of 1 watt, and probably doesn't have
10 people trying to hit it at once, but the principal is the same.

But the LEO satellites seem to be very busy unless it's the middle of
the night, and so being able to hear if you're even hitting it (or if
you're interfering with somebody else) will be very useful. But not
essential.

I suspect that what Terl is trying to state that since they're
generally so busy, if you can't do it `right', don't do it at all and
let somebody else do it. But you can do it easily enough _without_
full duplex.

You also don't _need_ a radio that can do full duplex. If you have
two radios, you can transmit with one and receive with another.
Sometimes even a standard scanner will work as the receiver, though
often they're not very sensitive.

As for how to track the satellite, your prediction program will
probably give you the approximate path of the satellite across the sky
over time. Point your antenna there. You don't need to be exact, but
you should be able to get an idea of how close you are by the strength
of the signal you receive.

The really serious people have computerized trackers, but you
certainly don't need that unless you have really high gain antennas.
(Which would probably be too big to hold in the VHF/UHF bands.)

--
Doug McLaren, , AD5RH
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy