I used the equipment for the same reason, to communicate through the Oscar 10 and 13 satellites at home. Oscar 10 was launched in 1983. At that time, I was living in an apartment. I strung up some smaller yagis on the balcony that fortunately faced towards the southwest. I was able to use some, but not all passes of the satellite.
I also used the equipment for terrestrial communications. When I started renting a house, I put up a large yagi for 2-meters. With SSB, you can make contacts out to about 300-400 miles. Enough for contacts between Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles area.
I also made much longer distance contacts with that station with special propagation modes. Meteor bounce, sporadic-E and trans-Pacific (Hawaii) ducting (about 2400 miles).
For the 70cm equipment, I participated in VHF/UHF contests with multioperator groups. This is where we'd go to mountain tops to operate. I was lucky enough to operate from Mt. Pinos a couple of times before ham radio was banned from there. Mt. Pinos is a 8847 ft. mountain at the southern end of the central valley and by far the best location for VHF/UHF operating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinos
Of course, this was in the 80's and 90's. Nowadays, weak signal VHF/UHF may not be very active where you live.
