New User Report, Seattle WA

Hi,

I recently received and set up my dreamcatcher 3.03. As a technically inclined user, setup was straightforward. I added a “quad shielded” “3ghz” 25 ft long rg-6 cable from the hardware store, and it seems to be working great.

I have the antenna taped to a tripod and not-very-carefully aligned. The view is from a balcony through some mild tree cover to the sky. I have a SNR of -12dB and I have a consistent lock and am receiving packets.

Here are a few notes on my experience. Please take these as constructive criticism — I’m thrilled it’s working, and I have fast internet at home so there’s no actual inconvenience for me

I am noticing that there seems to be less new content than I expected over the first 24 hour period I’ve had it on. It appears from the tuner that it might have been downloading the same wikipedia article on multiple occasions? And, it’s the afternoon of the 12th, but I don’t see any news articles newer than the 11th yet. What should I expect? Seems like a missed opportunity to have more timely news and updates, especially if there’s more bandwidth now.

I’d also appreciate more information in the UI about the different file transfers and their status, including ones that completed, and especially ones that failed (!). Right now I can only see the current transfer in the tuner. I get very little / no feedback about any failed transfers. Am I missing out on content because of something to do with my reception? I have no idea, and no way to tell.

While investigating, I looked around in the system log, and that leads me to the next item of feedback.

In the Log Viewer, under system messages, I’m seeing a lot of uncaught exceptions related to telemetry.outernet.is. If I understand correctly, if I gave the dreamcatcher my wifi password, it would connect to this server and give status reports about signal quality. That’s fine, but I’d rather not connect it to my wifi, so it’s failing to look up the address. It’d be nice to catch the exception so I could more easily see any other errors.

Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: UNCAUGHT EXCEPTION { Error: getaddrinfo EAI_AGAIN telemetry.outernet.is:443
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: at Object.exports._errnoException (util.js:1036:11)
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: at errnoException (dns.js:33:15)
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: at GetAddrInfoReqWrap.onlookup [as oncomplete] (dns.js:76:26)
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: code: ‘EAI_AGAIN’,
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: errno: ‘EAI_AGAIN’,
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: syscall: ‘getaddrinfo’,
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: hostname: ‘telemetry.outernet.is’,
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: host: ‘telemetry.outernet.is’,
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: port: 443 } Error: getaddrinfo EAI_AGAIN telemetry.outernet.is:443
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: at Object.exports._errnoException (util.js:1036:11)
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: at errnoException (dns.js:33:15)
Aug 12 22:16:25 outernet user.notice root: at GetAddrInfoReqWrap.onlookup [as oncomplete] (dns.js:76:26)

The browser-based UI is very cool, and works well from my laptop. It seems a bit overkill for accessing it from a mobile phone, since the assets I’m most interested in (especially news, wikipedia articles), are already static html pages or plain text anyway. When I try to access it from my mobile phone, it is very wasteful of screen space, and while I can click around, I can’t actually scroll down to see a news article, and this prevents me from actually using it.

Serving news and wikipedia pages as static html, such as at 10.0.0.1/mobile, would make this actually usable from a mobile phone. It seems like this would require very little work, and provide a lot of value.

On the other hand, it is receiving data. Thanks!

1 Like

This was very useful feedback. Thanks for taking time to write it up.

Good idea. this would also help viewing from my 8" tablet. Something optimized for “mobile”.