Tonight I had one of the best times I have ever had on the satellites. I'm not too sure you all would enjoy it for the same reasons, but I thought it was amazing.
I was starting to receive the bird, and I tried TX'ing into it, but for some reason the tone didn't stay programmed into my FT-60. So with one hand I'm trying not to loose the satellite with my arrow antenna, while with the other hand I am trying to program the radio.
Eventually I give up on programming it so it automatically does the split, so I program in 145.99/67hz tone on one channel, and then 437.805-437.790 (in 5khz steps) in the other channels. Once I got it all programmed enough so it will work, the ISS is at the peak, and I was literally recieving it at full strength, where all of the bars in my HT are lit up.
At this point in the pass, it seemed like I was doing pretty well between the 5 different tasks, aiming the antenna, polorization, doppler, switching between TX/RX channels, and making contacts. I really enjoyed this part because it worked, despite the severe improvisions I had to make to get it to work.
Although I only made three contacts (W5KUB, W5VG, WA4NVM), I would still consider this a very successful pass.