[tomfanning]

The experience operating sats is very different depending on where you are on the globe. Advice that's okay in one place may be bad advice in a different location.

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.