Hello there
Yesterday my Outernet Receiver DIY Kit arrived. I was quite surprised not to find the hardware I had ordered (small board, RTL2832 Dongle, BIAS Injector, LNA and Patch Antenna), but a much larger board and a different antenna. A sticker on the box told to attach it to the LNA Bypass SMA, not to the LNA IN SMA, as this is an active antenna.
Also the cable was missing to connect the antenna to the board. The antenna I had ordered had a cable directly attached according to the picture.
Well being a ham I was able to find fitting connectors to improvise a cable.
Well this is what I did. Then I spent about two hours trying to get any signal form the satellite. I nearly despaired and already feared I got some broken hardware.
I started browsing the outernet.is website, which at the moment is completely broken, dead links wherever you go. Finally I found this:
https://docs.outernet.is/Dreamcatcher%20Armbian%20Code%20Snippets.html
And this was the solution. It looks like by default, the bypass SMA is not the selected one and the bias tee is not active on the bypass SMA, not powering the active antenna.
After enabling the bypass SMA and bias - bang +5db signal. Not a sigle packet getting lost!
May I strongly suggest to outernet.is to please add a note to the package, on how to enable the correct connector and bias?
Please also fix all the dead links on your website.
Some more question: I would like to use the dreamcatcher for other things too, so I would like to directly access the onboard RTL chip. But 'apt' or 'apt-get' is not installed. So I also am not able to update the software to the actual versions.
I have not found this mentioned on the website.
Any hints on how to do that?
-Benoit-