If possible. Not everyone has fancy-pants cross-band full duplex capability. I know a couple HTs will do it now, but this is still a bit exotic. This is the strongest space amateur FM repeater ever; surely those of us who are better equipped can use SO-50, etc, without issue, and we shouldn't get too mad if there's a little less-than-ideal operation on something as newbie-friendly as this.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/BaoFeng-BF-F8HP-Two-Way-136-174Mhz-40...

It's a really big problem-- people who can't hear whether and how well they're getting in, interfering with people who are.

There's often dozens of people contending for time on a little 7 minute pass. A QSO finishes and everyone keys at once to get in. Someone has bad doppler correction on the uplink and isn't making it in and you can't really tell who it is or tell them. Someone else with a PL tone mistake jams everyone. Someone else can't get through well enough to be intelligible, but still can cause big QRM and confusion for everyone else (is that someone answering? is that person successfully having a QSO and -I- am hearing badly?).

Just about every radio will do what you describe. You don't -want- a cross-band channel usually, because you want to tune separately for TX and RX. (I've also done it where you make many, many channels with pairs of uplink and downlink frequencies).

With real full duplex, satellite is, say, 5x easier -and- you stop being disruptive to other users of the sat.

I'm just getting started in this world.

A QSO finishes and everyone keys at once to get in.

Aaah, interesting. I've never been around one of those situations and it never occurred to me that enough people would be doing something this niche at one time for that kind of jam-up to occur.

Thanks for the heads-up. I guess maybe I'll look at investing in a real full-duplex radio at some point. Probably a mobile though, not an HT. Getting a decent mobile rig for my truck is next on my ham wish-list anyway.

One final heads-up, the vertical antennas typically fitted to vehicles make really poor satellite antennas because you can easily emit enough power to make it into the sat, but there isn't enough directional gain to hear the downlink, so you're back in the same situation. A dual band yagi antenna really is the way to go. You also don't want to use a mobile radio with a yagi unless it's turned down to low power, because of RF exposure limits at VHF/UHF. A typical portable station is a dual band yagi (e.g. Arrow II) with one FD or two HD handheld radios, a headset, and a voice recorder, and a typical fixed setup is az-el rotator with computer control, dual circularly polarised X-quad yagis, masthead preamplifiers, and Doppler control of uplink and downlink frequencies.

If you decide to... it's important to just plan to listen to a few passes and get to hearing the satellite really well before you try to transmit, though.

If I followed this advice a couple decades ago I'd never have gotten into operating sats. Yes, now that I'm equipped for FD I'd never operate without it, but..

That's my setup - I'm not better equipped than that.

My decades-old FT-470 can do true full duplex too, but it's less common in current radios. Just dual watch now.

If a D72 is your cheapest HT, then well, congrats.

An incomplete list of full duplex vhf/uhf cross-band FM radios can be found in this reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/97jhik/gettin...

AFAIK the only options are TH-D72 and Wouxun Dual.

See this video of John Brier KG4AKV with his front-backpack TM-V71A mount. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7Ukh_nT2Tg

What it takes to hit the repeater I'm less sure. I've heard it can be done with an HT like mine, but I'm guessing that's only possible when it's directly overhead, or very near so. That said, I'd be happy to find out that I'm wrong about that.

Satellite comms is something I want to play with, personally, so I welcome this news. Need to get my Foundation license (UK) before I can go two-way, though.

https://www.jvckenwood.com/en/press/2020/03/press_200313_2.h...

I waited a few times to see it, and it's always just a few minutes it's visible. It orbits low and makes the full cycle around the globe in only 90 minutes.

The site is incredibly awesome and helped me see the ISS (and other satellites) quite a few times already!

Yes, that's approximately what I remember. The path of ISS is created with the goal that ISS doesn't fly over the same pieces of land or sea. Instead, it takes a lot of orbits before I can see it crossing exactly over my location, giving me around 10 minutes when that cross is ideal, otherwise, it's less, if the current path is close enough at all. Seeing is of course limited more than obtaining a radio signal, as to see ISS it has to fly above you at the time that the sun can reflect from it, and to have clear skies. One doesn't need that to catch just a radio signal, but the ISS path should still be such that it's close to your location, and the time during the FM signal can be received will still be short.