Of course. Tested all of them on QO100 as well and all where fine. The need to warm up a bit, but then they are fine. But even on a cold start i had no Problem with Othernet getting a lock.
Good point, my cheap lnbf are not all pll locking, but they fit into the boom of my dish (rectangular), some drift with ambient temperature by as much as 400KHz which put’s them out of ‘lock’.
but you are right I am overthinking this… what works is important
Of course SDRs, for a normal Ham Transreceiver you would need a quite expensive converter from ~1ghz LNB Output to the 2m/70cm band.
Even a normal rtlsdr for 20€ works great.
How expensive are those converters?
well something between 100€ and 500€ or so. But ehy using that when you can have a waterfall with a 20€ rtlsdr 
What rig are you using for uplink, I have not had the $$ or the time for quite a while and I have an older IC-706 from before kids and before they added 70cm to them. I spent a few years playing with the FM sats before they all died and hunting for a cheap 440 ssb rig or kit as the bent pipe sats came back into vogue. I just used an old Alinco DJ580t and a stick and wire DIY Arrow yaggi for the FM sats, my favorite was AO-27. I remember back in AO-40 days someone banging out CW on 440 with an FM HT and using a downconverter to another rig for the downlink.
I use a Pluto SDR for Uplink with a cheap wifi Amp, not soo much power but enough.
Just to be clear, there are some FM Sat’s in the Air. I had QSOs over AO-92, AO-95 as well as SO-50 and that all worked well with a Baofeng handheld (5w) and an Arrow Yagi.
Also build myself an Carbon Arrow Yagi 
https://tysonpower.de/blog/carbon-arrow-yagi-antenna
1 Like
Nice, were you able to get it as a sample? I have an inactive account but used to get all kinds of engineering samples from Analog. Never requested a complete assembly though, but between them and a friend being the regional rep for Atmel though it was like raiding a candy store.
I just bought it when it was released over digikey. Well worth the 100€. Had a lot of fun so far with many different applications and the Pluto.
I was going to make an Al arrow style yaggi years ago but arrows where I can find them are really expensive despite being about the best grade aluminum without paying for aerospace certification same for carbon.
Perhaps now I can find a better deal on carbon composite dowels as I was surprised the low price I got on a carbon wing spar for my kid’s model airplane project.
My poor boy arrow was I think steel fence wire reflectors/parasites and a Cu ground wire(3-4mm?) jpole on a drilled broomstick, I made a bandpass splitter with some caps and coils to send the UHF to the UHF antenna and VHF to VHF.
it’s been a while since my DC 3 has been running with the LNB sent for test and eval. i believe it worked for a time and i collected data. today i updated the Skylark f/w to 5.7 and tried to receive packets, and it looks like the test LNB is dead.
reconnected the original Maverick LNB and even with hand-held rough sky pointing, the PCKT and BUSY LEDs came alive. sometime after the SES-2 frequency change, i think i will be able to run my DC again full-time.
@kb3cs i had the same issue with mine it just died after a while it came back to life once but thats about it before it died again and i put my maveric back in
the ‘dead’ LNBF passes the sanity tests at boot time and the LNB_ON indicator lights up, but not a flicker from PCKT, and BUSY flashes just once every now and then.
put the Maverick back on (after Tuner reconfig) and got lots of indicator activity right away.
until the Maverick stops working, i won’t worry about having to find a replacement.
Yep that’s how mine went also