Is Sale Price an OMEN?

I use my Othernet most of the time but don’t check the website. Is the $49 sale price an omen for a new set of hardware? Am I going to be good for the near future?

You will definitely be good for the future. The next version, 3.04, is a cost-reduced version of the receiver. You are getting an outstanding deal on the 3.03.

What do you use your receiver for? Is the VOA newscast useful?

I intend to use my receiver for an upcoming public event to demonstrate data reception from geostationary satellite. It’s Amateur Radio adjacent.
VOA News is interesting, though, for me, i think BBC News or a rotating selection of News in English would be more useful.
“Othernet Radio” in the works possibly? Commercial stations have audio files prepared and loaded on a disk and then a schedule sets the order of transmission and repeats. Send audio files and a schedule file, then run an audio output daemon locally.

1 Like

I, like KB3CS am an amateur radio operator so I use the Dreamcatcher to demonstrate geostationary satellite. The SES-2 is always in the same place so I don’t have to check schedules of orbiting satellites.
On a personal level, I like that a lot of the news sources are from overseas. It allows me to get a different point of view. I also like that the news focuses on Africa. I believe that Africa will be the next area of conflict and events happen there that I don’t see on my regular news sources.
Voice of America is interesting to hear as well. There are often disparities between what the government says domestically vs. what it says on the VOA. Today, I heard a Swahili guy talking about US basketball. Who would have thought?

@John I’m surprised more hams are not using it as an APRS relay.

1 Like

Ham radio is so vast that I have not even ventured into APRS yet. I do have the equipment to do APRS being that I use a packet modem to exchange, forward and store messages. I have been concentrating on digital transmission of text and images both locally and long distance. Although I can interlink with traditional email and text messages through the WINLINK system, my goal has been to communicate as much and far as I can with only radio. (Then there are guys who only care about putting a pin on a map to say that they talked to somebody from there. Like I said, it is a vast hobby with wide interests.)

i only found out about the APRS capability by looking at everything written to the SD Card by the DC.
if you build it and don’t tell anyone, will anyone use it? did someone alert Bob Bruninga WB4APR about this capability?

We built the APRS relay system with Bob’s input.

perfect! but has he been telling anyone about it? do you document it anywhere? like i said, i read up on the DC before purchase and knew nothing about APRS capability until i looked at every file on the SD Card.
and shouldn’t the routing identifier be changed from OUTNET to OTHNET?

Maybe even OTHER, as it would be easier to remember.

No, we’ve been doing a lousy job of marketing the service. Do you have any idea how much traffic goes through Winlink per day?

Do you have any pictures of the new dream catcher board and setup?

i think you mean APRS-IS. if so: “lots” would be a correct answer.
more than is processed by Winlink daily, i’m certain.

I definitely meant the Winlink email service. Why is that not more heavily used?

winlink is not a “ham chat” mode. it’s meant for Emergency Communications and for those far far away from any communications infrastructure (sailboats at sea, for instance).

As an amateur radio operator and involved in emergency management, I would love to see Winlink forms and FLDigi forms included on the content stream. The forms are small text files that allow easy transfer of standard emergency messages between ham stations. However, everyone must have the same version of the forms in advance. In an emergency, it’s not always easy to make sure everyone has the right form but with a Dreamcatcher running all the time, everyone would have the up-to-date forms ready to go!


Can you give an example of these forms? Do you mean a web form that can be used to broadcast standardized messages to all Othernet receivers?