Hi Philip,

TXCO is only needed for digital modes.

I use an Amazon Camera bag, with camera harness body strap and my two radios with a 6 AH Bienno LiPO battery. I added Power Pole adapters to the back power connectors, you can get those on eBay.  Also a DC Y cable.
Please note that the 817 does draw power even when powered off, see : http://www.ka7oei.com/ft817_pwr.html   not much but if you don't use the radios for a while you may wind up with a dead battery. Happened to me once.

No need for SSB/CW filters, unless you plan on doing CW on the sats. 

Do order a Mini-Circuits Low pass filter for the 2m side if you use an Arrow antenna otherwise you will get desense.Look for BLP-200+ (see past AMSAT-BB posts)  Ignore the low wattage spec. This is needed for sats with 2M uplinks otherwise the third harmonic will ruin your UHF downlink.  Been extensively covered on Twitter. Sat ops, including this one use it all the time.

73, Adrian AA5UK




On Monday, July 26, 2021, 12:46:29 PM CDT, Philip Jenkins <n4hf.philip@gmail.com> wrote:


Hi.  I acquired my second FT-817ND this past weekend, and I have a couple of questions for those of you who are using 817/818s for portable satellite work.

1) Are you using the internal battery packs (whether NiCd or alkaline) OR an external battery(ies)? If the latter, do you advise using two separate batteries, or just one for both (using the included DC cable:E-DC-6)? (I've heard good things about Bioenna)

2) I'm probably going to use these rigs just for satellites, so are the SSB/CW filters worth getting? I see one difference between the 817 and 818 is that the latter includes a TCXO; is getting the TCXO unit for the 817(s) worth it? (Probably not going to use digital modes on the birds - except possibly telemetry)

Any suggestions - or pitfalls to work around - for using the 2 rigs like this?

Thanks

Philip N4HF

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