Hearing about another obscure, failed satellite service is awesome, I don't think I would have known this was ever a thing if you didn't make a video on it, Thank you for covering it!
Gabe I'm so happy you were able to get a least a little data into the Outer/Othernet devices. I can't wait 'till you dig into the rest of the stuff in the box!
@@saveitforparts Bro, we live the best life in the Middle East. There is no censorship or dictatorship. I don't know how you said this. You can create an artificial satellite and you cannot verify a simple piece of information.
Glad you were able to try it. I've had Othernet for several years and really had plans for setting it up with neighborhood wifi for "off the internet neighborhood wifi" I was going to include weather sensors and setup a neighborhood jabber server and forum. Sort of like a place where people could organize their gardening and other neighborhood stuff along with get some basic info like weather and news without having internet should someone choose not to have it. I am sad to see it go, but I understand the cost was about 15k a month. Hope you find a replacement and let us all know about it!
Most free things come with a price.. Like when Facebook gave free internet to India.. They just didn't mention the free internet only allowed Facbook sites or sites they could make money from.. Also they didn't mention how everyone was tracked by Facebook... Best we could hope for now would be Elon offering cheaper internet for remote hardship cases etc.. Thats a possibility...
I had one of their kits in 2017/2018 when it worked on L-Band, with a RTL stick and a Raspberry-Pi like board. It had a small patch antenna that you could just put in front of the window. Or in my case outside on the roof as I had no window facing the correct direction. Even worked with them when their computer failed and the Europe downlink went silent, recommended them a second-hand computer store that could ship a rack server to the uplink station which would then be mounted by ground station personnel. Saved them shipping overseas from the US. They were on a tight budget back then, it was just an idealist 3-man project that had only income from selling the kits and had to rely on satellite providers giving capacity for free.
In the early 1990s when I was in high school, my HS library had an Apple IIc hooked up to a modem connected to a coax cable that I assumed was attached to the local cable provider, but it totally makes sense that it was connected to an antenna on the roof. It was pretty old tech back then (at least the computer the school could spare to run the system) and other than students who needed essay topic ideas, I’m pretty sure I was the only one to consistently use the system. I was always amazed at the breadth of news topics that were constantly coming in (albeit very slowly). Seeing the software interface you showed totally brought back a flood of memories! Other than being text only, what I remember could totally have been a precursor to the Othernet/Outernet system you showed here. Thanks for the blast from the past!
The Othernet carrier is fairly narrowband (20kbps or maybe a bit more), which means that the "Bulleye" LNBs they offer for this, while they use a crystal-locked synthesizer, can still drift +/- 5KHz or more. For a 10MHz-wide carrier, that's not a lot. For a 10s-of-kHz wide carrier, that's a lot! It also explains why, under ideal circumstances, you don't need a dish. The feed-horn itself probably offers 10-12dB of antenna gain, which is probably (barely) enough to allow the narrowband signal to be seen and demodulated. A MUCH smaller dish than your 7ft would probably work fine.
On the forums, a bunch of people got 2-7dB of gain using things from soup cans (2dB), to pringles cans (3dB) and nicely "coned" wire mesh (5-7dB). Some dollar store metal mesh trashcans might work pretty well.
@@443DM I've mated a galvanized steel funnel (sometimes used for transmission fluid transfer, because it can attack plastics) to a Ku-band LNBF to achieve not-unimpressive gain boosts. A shallower angle produces a bit more gain for the same final aperture, but for "improvised" systems, they're not bad.
I was thinking, man what witty comment can i come up with for Gabe this time. But i think i just want you to know. I love your channel. Completely random stuff i get to learn about every video. With almost the hate and worry in the country i just want you to know how much i appreciate learning without drama. Thanks Gabe. Truly.
Towards the beginning of this video I was kind of excited thinking I could do this myself. But once you got to the professionally mounted equipment on the tripod I said I'm just going to let you do this for me so I can kick back and relax. Your videos are awesome.!
Well isn't this just dandy. I was wondering what the heck happened to them about a year ago. No idea why your video was suggested but it looks like youtubes finally figured me out. (I'm sure that won't last) Thanks so much for the update. This really made my week
I’m all for it. I binged a bunch of your previous satellite videos last night. All great stuff. Love the longer form stuff also. And I always love when that old Soyo display pops up too. That’s a name you don’t hear much anymore.
If you want to go after their story, I can point you to some former project participants and senior community members who may help get in touch with the people behind the project.
This sounds so much like the Satellite craze of the late 80's into the 90's. Once enough people were purchasing dishes, they began to need 'descramblers'. Eventually the security outpaced the advantage of using this form of entertainment. I never really thought about the same thing with internet.
Damn, I remember making a little presentation about the Outernet for a school assignment many years ago, totally forgot this existed. I believe it was still just an idea back then, never saw it in action - so cool to see it here!
That "Bullseye" LNB can be easily modified for better stability by injecting a 25mhz ref on the red F connector by carefully removing the 25mhz crystal from the pcb. No other mods. Yes it requires another length of coax from your ref source. I use one on my Q0-100 setup instead of the DX Patrol LNB. The Bullseye LNB is a pretty good all round device. Have fun. :-)
What an odd service to offer. Very impressive that you got to receive it based on the few crumbs of info out there! You're really just getting it done now!
WOW!!! It was like Christmas when you opened the box with the Othernet equipment Gems!!!! Love your enthusiasm, I would have been the same way! So cool, love it when you get excited as we do!
Yeah Othernet has died. I’m very impressed you have data!😅 Hey! That’s my Whole Earth Catalog on your top shelf. I can tell by the signature worn spine. I’m glad it’s in a good place now.😂
Those LNBs aren't just regular universal LNBs - they're the 'Bullseye' LNB with TCXO LOs that you need for narrowband signals. Still not hugely expensive but not a regular ten buck LNBF.
@@yoppindiaIt’s not so much signal strength - the LNA stage is nothing special on these. It’s just normal DVB-S(2) transponders are wideband so frequency stability of the local oscillator isn’t so important - so they can drift around a surprising amount especially the DRO types. Makes it virtually impossible to use for narrowband signals when you can wind up drifting up and down many times your channel width. That’s why that web application tunes up and down in fine steps to hunt it out - even with the low drift “Bullseye” the reproducibility is poor.
Glad you made this video. I wanted to get into Outernet when it started and I was working on a Library Science degree. I thought there was a great opportunity to volunteer to help with content etc., but I could never get in contact with anyone at the project. I haven’t thought about it for years until you posted. Thanks!
I remember saving this to my favorites back in the 2014-15 time-frame. I really wish this would stick around because I've wanted to use this for years.
Neat. This system reminds me of WaveTop which was software from the mid 90's that you would use with a TV tuner card on a PC. It would send you random stuff over the air via the VBI "Vertical Blanking Interval" (or VBlank) that you can capture and sift through. It was marketed as a free info source rather than free Internet, kinda like Othernet. Although, the Othernet is way more sophisticated and much faster, at least when it was going strong. WaveTop was extremely slow. You wouldn't even get your first bit of data for a few days and then it would trickle in.
Fantastic Gabe! I had heard of it but never imagined that it was in working order. I am experimenting with satellite tv but just like you I am always trying to find the right positions.
If I had more money, and more time to put into catching radio frequencies… I’d be doing all of the same stuff you are doing!! But I’m struggling to save up to buy a discovery dish at the moment 😂 I love the stuff you’re doing! I’m living vicariously through your channel 😂
When I got an Outernet kit years ago, it seemed to work decently with the bare LNB dangling out a window. I haven't tried it out in at least 6 years though.
That fogged case is really funny, every time you showed it I thought "why is he censoring this?" Like other Gabe's glasses with black line across the eyes, it would be funny to use a physical piece of fogged plastic to censor a video.
It was such a relief to get the rain. Thanks for highlighting this technology- had no idea this was a thing. Too bad about its current state of affairs... oh well.
Great video on an obscure bit of technology that never really moved past obscure (what a shame). IMO their main issue was always moving between birds necessitated users to accumulate yet one more piece of incompatible hardware to keep playing. I was able to round-trip data through the system using the APRS feed that you mentioned and that was fun to achieve. Anyway, thanks for all of the fun videos!
This is a pretty great concept as you say. Something like this doesn't need high bandwidth or low lag, so perfect for an info feed. It would be cool if an open source or community driven system like this came along, especially if it also had some kind of message store and forward function, or even a full BBS. Something like that also shouldn't need much bandwidth. That would help keep people in remote areas connected to the world fairly efficiently. Plus if the satellite was in a higher orbit it wouldn't make astronomers mad like starlink does!
there's a lot more than religious crap on FTA, but it's too technical for most people to mess with. You need both ku and cband though to get most of the content - a lot is on cband. It used to be a lot more interesting a few years ago when all the live news feeds were still by sat - now it's all by cellular/IP and you can't see any of it.
They did introduce some great general use hardware: an rtl-sdr compatible module that was designed to be possibly modifiable and the morpheus combined rf generator | frequency changer. Morpheus is a great device to use as a microwave frequency upconverter and downconverter. They also designed the bullseye high stability LNB which is the goto device for QO-100 satellite reception.
It was a fun project and had potential. I think one of the ideas was to set up some sort of request site. So that you could ask for non copyright materials. Books, Music, news. But if you were able to log onto a website to do this you already have internet and could just do it yourself. Each board version was about 100 dollars. Probably made little on the boards and no income stream to pay for the satellite time.
Near as I can tell from the Dreamcatcher 3.05 schematics, the LoRA chip is actually used for demodulating the satellite signal! In effect, they're sending a LoRA signal over the satellite. But since there's very little actual documentation, I can't confirm this.
This is correct. They are basically sending an uplink with LoRA modulation. The Dreamcatcher has the LNB do a simple down-conversion to a frequency that is compatible with the LoRA radio so it can demodulate the data signal. They also included a LoRA module capable for re-transmitting the downlink signal locally with the idea that you'll only need one satellite downlink to cover a small town or village.
Pretty cool. Never heard of othernet, but sounds a bit like facebook trying to take over remote areas and giving "free internet" where it's basically just a doomscrolling ad-feed.. PS. I spotted Salvation in your bookshelf.. I'm a huge old Peter F. Hamilton fan, glad to see you enjoy his stuff too. Isn't it just the best? :) What other good books have you got? Maybe you can do a short vid about them for us? Would be interesting.
It looks like you found a suitable power supply. For future reference: if you need 5 volts with alot of current you can use the 5 volt rail of an old computer power supply and wire it to a USB plug. If you do go that route don't forget you have short a pin to ground to make the power supply turn on. Just Google power supply pinout. I believe for a 20 pin connector it's pin 14 and 16 for a 24 pin.
@@jasonprivately1764 you can use an old power supply from a desktop pc for 3.3, 5, or 12 volts. You just have to connect a certain pin to ground in order for it to turn on without a motherboard connected. Then you can connect whatever kind of plug you want to the different wires to get whatever voltage you need. I've done it before but its been a while so just google something like 'using a pc power supply for 5 volts' if you want to know more.
Does anybody here remember "free world dial-up" , an early adopter voice over IP over the internet thing , they even had phones from Thailand that was voice over IP over Wi-Fi, nobody else did anything like that! It was incredible. You just needed a $300 Cisco router and at least two permanent ISDN connections at maybe a thousand a month. And with that you could have free long distance calls! Great savings! Of course this was the 90s, and if you spent a few hours on the phone to the nearest city you're getting a $300 or $500 phone bill, so I'm actually serious it would save you tons of money, especially if you had a long distance relationship with a psychiatrist that does their appointments over the phone. I mean just imagine having the free cash to spend a few thousand dollars on your phone bill and still be able to pay your $300 rent!
It's a damn shame they never found a business model, it was such a neat idea. There was a Usenet-by-satellite service back in the 90s that I always hoped would resurrect and modernize, and of course there's Toosheh and stuff in the east, but I've never had a chance to scan the feeds in the west and see if there's stuff hidden away in the transport streams.
@@saveitforparts Whoah, that would super interesting. When you've had the Winegard units scanning the sky, that's what I always imagined building, a thing that would just autonomously scan and jot down anything out of the ordinary.
Im not sure if it is similar to RPi but I have had to sometimes tell the OS what its DNS server IP was so that it could actually connect to the internet.
For powering high amperage devices like the Dreamcatcher you can hack together an old AT or ATX power supply with a USB cable which has the appropriate end on it. Just cut the USB-A end off and solder the red and black wires to a red and black wire on the PSU you use. With ATX power supplies you will need to jump the green and any black wire together to enable the PSU.
Back in the 90s AP had satellite distribution of data to their Newsroom software. A small dish downloaded AP news to a windows nt server. Can't remember if it was l band or s band.
earlier than that: 1982 - The AP introduces Laserphoto II, the first network capable of transmitting photographs by satellite, as well as over ordinary telephone land lines and microwave links. Designed to facilitate the distribution of photographs in color, the network requires half an hour to transmit three black-and-white separations of the color image, which correspond to the cyan, magenta, and yellow plates used in color printing. Laserphoto II operates side-by-side with the existing Laserphoto network until both are superseded by the PhotoStream system in 1991.
Outernet sounds like a really cool idea, it's a pity it never took off/is shutting down :( I'm trying to think of a more modern implementation that avoids the expensive/custom hardware issues you mentioned. For the most accessible ground station hardware, I'd imagine a Ku band LNB + RTL-SDR would do it. The first problem would be funding/persuading enough GEO operators to get on board, and then the linked problems of "cheap LNBs drift so needs a wideband signal", vs "funding a wideband transmission is prohibitively expensive". My bet for the immediate future of this sort of thing is probably LEO LoRA satellites. LoRA RX hardware is cheap, cubesats are cheap(ish). With the right kind of financial backing, user friendly software/hardware packages, and de-bloated downlinks, I'd imagine it could be a pretty effective RX only data service.
Ask Elon Musk (soon to be minister of efficiency in the government) to allow receive only use of StarLink for free. Have communities moderate data to send that is checked for actual facts and not propaganda narrative content. It woud get a lot more people to invest in hardware if some service was available that has a non-recurring cost. Imagine if some Linux distribution were to mirror their data so that anyone in the world had access to a stable OS with standard productivity tools local Mesh Radio protocols without MS Recall and other rights violating BS.
That’s pretty rad, too bad it didn’t get much attention and they couldn’t get funding for it. 😅 I’m sad to see it go. Thanks for putting your time into it!!
Decades ago, in Europe, I try to catch data packets with a skystar broadcast satellite tuner card in my pc. The service name was sat torrent, and spread by Astra and Eutelsat satellites, (you send your request via landline dialup internet, and got your data from satellite.). My/our method was: catch the downstream a day, and try to decompile. Mostly pictures from websites, mp3 downloads (unknown singers, unknown songs), and video files (p•rn, and middle eastern preachers speeches). Few month later turn to boring, because the got data was similar. But was fun for a while. i'm curious: now working same service yet?
Yes, I have done that as well, for a while. Used a "dreambox" satellite receiver that could easily relay a DVB PID to the ethernet interface, and some software that collected downloaded files. Indeed the users were mainly from middle eastern countries, and the material downloaded was just what you would expect but are not allowed to say.
If you felt like spending the time, you could find ia repository that supports that architecture and manually, edit the source files in that Linux distribution to get an update.
Hah. This just reminded me that I have a Dreamcatcher v3.03 I bought 5 years ago and after a lot of fiddling I couldn't get it to pick up a single packet. I had the same experience you did with the included LNA and I figured being up here at 47 degs had something to do with it. So it all went back into a box to be revisited. That's a shame it's shutting down, although without some sort of philanthropy or grant funding, it was inevitable. It would be tough to get either without some sort of 'strings' attached, considering we're dealing with information for people who can't get it elsewhere. I think the only thing they could do would be Wikipedia-style crowdfunding or maybe even become a wing of Wikipedia, the EFF, or some other group that has some funds and has fidelity of information in their charter.
I've got a question or... I'm wondering... D'you have any idea how the ISP(phone, satellite, cable, ect.) gets online so that they can sell service/access to all of us? Couldn't, for lack of a better term, we just get online that way?
Nice idea, but i think the built-in need for specialized hardware like that instantly makes this only a toy for tech enthusiasts. Shortwave has so much potential still.
Except these days its like every piece of hardware you use is designed to ruin AM, Shortwave etc.. I tried it as a kid and it was great, tried it last year and even the few signals left are super noisy.. Like how you could see the stars 30 years ago from a small city and now you can only see the moon etc..
Thank you for being so amazing on another adventure with technology.Please don't ever stop making content so that we can enjoy it for the rest of our lives
I remember reading about this back in Europe approx. 10 years ago. And it always felt like even Teletext on FTA channels would give you more data/info than what outernet was beaming down to us. I always thought about buying one, just for fun, but then they went semi-silent and became hard to track down. If i remember correctly they had a office based in Germany somewhere with some outlet out in south Europe, maybe it was Spain or Italy? I might be totally off tho, its been a while! i even forgot about Othernet until this video xD
Technically it is true that Teletext sent more data, in that it has a higher bitrate than Outernet/Othernet. However, the Teletext carroussel revolves in only like 30 seconds, or a multiple of that for subpages, while the Outernet carroussel would take hours. You were supposed to keep the receiver powered on all day, and then once a day or so connect to it and view what it had collected. That would be a lot more than what you could see at one time on a typical Teletext service. They were based in the US but they had downlinks in the 3 geostationary areas of the world. In Europe they have been on Hotbird and Astra TV satellites (Ku band) and on Inmarsat (L band). The latter was uplinked from the Netherlands, but they had no office here, only a computer and modulator co-located at the uplink station in Burum.
Cool! I remember there being some subscription service that seemed to use regular dialup for data from your computer, but satellite DVB-S for the downlink, and the data was sent in clear text. Thus it was possible for anyone to receive it. Given how TCP and HTTP works, it wasn't possible to tell what URL a file came from (except the senders and receivers IP addresses), so in practice you could mostly run it for a while, look at the files and scratch your head wondering what people were doing online :) Is this still a thing, or if not when did it disappear? (This was something that could be received from the regular Astra and whatnot satellites in Europe, and IIRC it seemed like the service was aimed at Russian customers, but I might misremember). BTW although formally "SES" is the correct name, I think that nobody uses that in every day talk; "Astra" seems to be the name used. Or rather I think this still is the case, back in the days (from the initial Astra 1A up to say a decade or two ago) everybody just called it Astra).
About 15 years ago (?) there was another initiative from Europe doing almost the same. I used a standard sat receiver in my windows pc and used their software to capture their websites. I forgot the name of thos project - Perhaps someone can respond to this comment.
I remember around that time there was also real internet via geostationary satellites that used a DVB transponder (one PID of a DVB multiplex) and apparently they used telephone modems for the "up"link. The IP packets on the downlink were not encrypted at all and someone wrote software that assembled complete TCP sessions and stored them as files, so you could see what all the users were viewing....
@@Mr1Spring No, not really... I think it was on Eutelsat 7east but not sure about it. It was horrendously slow, I think the total bandwidth was only a couple of Mbit/s and it was shared by many users... No idea why anyone would want that.
I searched a bit more and it seems that it was SatGate and OpenSky for the service name, the software was (as usually) named SkyNet. It can still be found on a site named dvbskystar.
It will be interesting to see what can be done with the sdr section, 40-6G is a nice spread. I bet there is a linux utility out there somewhere for it. 👍
Hearing about another obscure, failed satellite service is awesome, I don't think I would have known this was ever a thing if you didn't make a video on it, Thank you for covering it!
Yeah, funny how the very people that would be interested in it haven't heard about it until it was too late. Seems like a marketing issue.
my favorite aspect of any/every SIFP video is the "wtf has he done now" factor 😃
Mine is he going to shave that crap off his face?😅
for REAL
Gabe I'm so happy you were able to get a least a little data into the Outer/Othernet devices. I can't wait 'till you dig into the rest of the stuff in the box!
Lots of good stuff in there! :-)
If you are the sender thanks for providing this cool stuff!
@W2GMD, if you sent this, thanks! Too cool Greg!
Greg is awesome!!
@@saveitforparts Bro, we live the best life in the Middle East. There is no censorship or dictatorship. I don't know how you said this. You can create an artificial satellite and you cannot verify a simple piece of information.
Glad you were able to try it. I've had Othernet for several years and really had plans for setting it up with neighborhood wifi for "off the internet neighborhood wifi" I was going to include weather sensors and setup a neighborhood jabber server and forum. Sort of like a place where people could organize their gardening and other neighborhood stuff along with get some basic info like weather and news without having internet should someone choose not to have it. I am sad to see it go, but I understand the cost was about 15k a month. Hope you find a replacement and let us all know about it!
Well that's certainly quite a cost! Sad to see something so awesome go down.
Most free things come with a price..
Like when Facebook gave free internet to India..
They just didn't mention the free internet only allowed Facbook sites or sites they could make money from..
Also they didn't mention how everyone was tracked by Facebook...
Best we could hope for now would be Elon offering cheaper internet for remote hardship cases etc..
Thats a possibility...
Have you considered LoRa as an alternative?
@reklin have been playing with meshtastic but I need to do some serious testing.
Amazon's Project Kuiper looks interesting. Coming in Late '24 or Early '25. Cheaper and just as good as that other guys "tarstink" service!
I had one of their kits in 2017/2018 when it worked on L-Band, with a RTL stick and a Raspberry-Pi like board.
It had a small patch antenna that you could just put in front of the window. Or in my case outside on the roof as I had no window facing the correct direction.
Even worked with them when their computer failed and the Europe downlink went silent, recommended them a second-hand computer store that could ship a rack server to the uplink station which would then be mounted by ground station personnel. Saved them shipping overseas from the US.
They were on a tight budget back then, it was just an idealist 3-man project that had only income from selling the kits and had to rely on satellite providers giving capacity for free.
lol "professionally zip tied" That phrase is perfect for this channel. That is a compliment. I love the channel.
“Free” and “space” are two of my favorite things!
Its never free, someone else pays for it
Like ICBM sent to your city. It is expensive. But you get it for free!
I'm also a Jewish astronomer lol
@@Kawka1122 problem with free ICBM's ... once you finally get one, everyone gets them : /
@@ker0dewell well well
In the early 1990s when I was in high school, my HS library had an Apple IIc hooked up to a modem connected to a coax cable that I assumed was attached to the local cable provider, but it totally makes sense that it was connected to an antenna on the roof. It was pretty old tech back then (at least the computer the school could spare to run the system) and other than students who needed essay topic ideas, I’m pretty sure I was the only one to consistently use the system. I was always amazed at the breadth of news topics that were constantly coming in (albeit very slowly). Seeing the software interface you showed totally brought back a flood of memories! Other than being text only, what I remember could totally have been a precursor to the Othernet/Outernet system you showed here. Thanks for the blast from the past!
Or likely to the phone lines that the internet came from back then....
The Othernet carrier is fairly narrowband (20kbps or maybe a bit more), which means that the "Bulleye" LNBs they offer for this, while they use a crystal-locked synthesizer, can still drift +/- 5KHz or more. For a 10MHz-wide carrier, that's not a lot. For a 10s-of-kHz wide carrier, that's a lot! It also explains why, under ideal circumstances, you don't need a dish. The feed-horn itself probably offers 10-12dB of antenna gain, which is probably (barely) enough to allow the narrowband signal to be seen and demodulated. A MUCH smaller dish than your 7ft would probably work fine.
Yes it should work with the bare LNB, but you need clear sight. It looks like he has trees in the path of the signal, which attenuate A LOT.
Maybe an old huge dish tv dish would work?
On the forums, a bunch of people got 2-7dB of gain using things from soup cans (2dB), to pringles cans (3dB) and nicely "coned" wire mesh (5-7dB). Some dollar store metal mesh trashcans might work pretty well.
@@443DM I've mated a galvanized steel funnel (sometimes used for transmission fluid transfer, because it can attack plastics) to a Ku-band LNBF to achieve not-unimpressive gain boosts. A shallower angle produces a bit more gain for the same final aperture, but for "improvised" systems, they're not bad.
FCC OTARD covers up to a 1.0 m dish, so that is the higher limit of "I must be able to put up an antenna."
I was thinking, man what witty comment can i come up with for Gabe this time. But i think i just want you to know. I love your channel. Completely random stuff i get to learn about every video. With almost the hate and worry in the country i just want you to know how much i appreciate learning without drama. Thanks Gabe. Truly.
Thanks! This was a fun one to film.
R.I.P. Outernet/Othernet
Closest thing I have seen to Project Xanadu. Hardware wise not software obviously
This brings back memories of teletext.
ČT czech television still transmits teletext
It's still on television in the Netherlands i believe as well.@@GuyWithASolderingIron
Turkish television also transmits teletext on the channel number 1
Swedish TV does too
it does sound a lot like the idea of teletext, I was about to comment that!
Towards the beginning of this video I was kind of excited thinking I could do this myself. But once you got to the professionally mounted equipment on the tripod I said I'm just going to let you do this for me so I can kick back and relax. Your videos are awesome.!
I don't know if any of my stuff is "professional", usually there's a lot of duct tape involved :-D
@@saveitforpartshaha
Well isn't this just dandy. I was wondering what the heck happened to them about a year ago. No idea why your video was suggested but it looks like youtubes finally figured me out. (I'm sure that won't last)
Thanks so much for the update.
This really made my week
Nice videos. Love them, it’s super fun to tinker with antennas and satellites. So this channel fits me perfectly 👍
Thanks for the support!
I’m all for it. I binged a bunch of your previous satellite videos last night. All great stuff. Love the longer form stuff also.
And I always love when that old Soyo display pops up too. That’s a name you don’t hear much anymore.
I found that Soyo in a junk pile at work. I actually do all my video editing on it.
You use Bing?
If you want to go after their story, I can point you to some former project participants and senior community members who may help get in touch with the people behind the project.
Yes, do that. It would be interesting
Hope Gabe spots this comment!
We have already got in contact.
@@jszigetvari👏👏👏
This sounds so much like the Satellite craze of the late 80's into the 90's. Once enough people were purchasing dishes, they began to need 'descramblers'. Eventually the security outpaced the advantage of using this form of entertainment. I never really thought about the same thing with internet.
Damn, I remember making a little presentation about the Outernet for a school assignment many years ago, totally forgot this existed. I believe it was still just an idea back then, never saw it in action - so cool to see it here!
That "Bullseye" LNB can be easily modified for better stability by injecting a 25mhz ref on the red F connector by carefully removing the 25mhz crystal from the pcb. No other mods. Yes it requires another length of coax from your ref source. I use one on my Q0-100 setup instead of the DX Patrol LNB. The Bullseye LNB is a pretty good all
round device. Have fun. :-)
I have yet to investigate reference sources, I keep hearing about them but have never tried one.
@@saveitforparts I was about to suggest receving the QO-100 satellite but then I realised that it's below the horizon in the US. :(
What an odd service to offer. Very impressive that you got to receive it based on the few crumbs of info out there! You're really just getting it done now!
We need to start a fund to get you a CubeSat into space :)
WOW!!! It was like Christmas when you opened the box with the Othernet equipment Gems!!!! Love your enthusiasm, I would have been the same way! So cool, love it when you get excited as we do!
Yeah Othernet has died.
I’m very impressed you have data!😅
Hey! That’s my Whole Earth Catalog on your top shelf. I can tell by the signature worn spine. I’m glad it’s in a good place now.😂
Those LNBs aren't just regular universal LNBs - they're the 'Bullseye' LNB with TCXO LOs that you need for narrowband signals. Still not hugely expensive but not a regular ten buck LNBF.
Cant we get signal from broadband LNB? is the signal too weak for normal LNB?
@@yoppindiaIt’s not so much signal strength - the LNA stage is nothing special on these. It’s just normal DVB-S(2) transponders are wideband so frequency stability of the local oscillator isn’t so important - so they can drift around a surprising amount especially the DRO types. Makes it virtually impossible to use for narrowband signals when you can wind up drifting up and down many times your channel width.
That’s why that web application tunes up and down in fine steps to hunt it out - even with the low drift “Bullseye” the reproducibility is poor.
Amazing stuff - admire your tenacity in sticking with this where there are so many 'unknowns' to eventually get data and content!
Glad you made this video. I wanted to get into Outernet when it started and I was working on a Library Science degree. I thought there was a great opportunity to volunteer to help with content etc., but I could never get in contact with anyone at the project. I haven’t thought about it for years until you posted. Thanks!
I remember saving this to my favorites back in the 2014-15 time-frame. I really wish this would stick around because I've wanted to use this for years.
Yes! I was super interested in Outernet - loving the channel.
Your descriptions are like the bomb, Man. Thanks so much. Seriously.
I didn't know DVB-S receiver to SDR conversions were a thing. I'm hooked, makes me want one of them now.
Neat. This system reminds me of WaveTop which was software from the mid 90's that you would use with a TV tuner card on a PC. It would send you random stuff over the air via the VBI "Vertical Blanking Interval" (or VBlank) that you can capture and sift through. It was marketed as a free info source rather than free Internet, kinda like Othernet. Although, the Othernet is way more sophisticated and much faster, at least when it was going strong. WaveTop was extremely slow. You wouldn't even get your first bit of data for a few days and then it would trickle in.
I didnt know outernet was online holy cow. I still have my outernet hardware.
Fantastic Gabe! I had heard of it but never imagined that it was in working order. I am experimenting with satellite tv but just like you I am always trying to find the right positions.
If I had more money, and more time to put into catching radio frequencies… I’d be doing all of the same stuff you are doing!! But I’m struggling to save up to buy a discovery dish at the moment 😂 I love the stuff you’re doing! I’m living vicariously through your channel 😂
LOL... I can't believe you tried the LNB without a dish of any kind. Such an optimist. 😄
When I got an Outernet kit years ago, it seemed to work decently with the bare LNB dangling out a window. I haven't tried it out in at least 6 years though.
Yes I remember an article showing you didn't need a dish. I think it was on the RTLSDR blog site.
You crazy SOB! Only someone with an extreme excess of time could do this; I'm so jealous! New subscriber here, lol.
So cool. I had never heard of this before. Absolutely amazing. I love this channel.
This reminds me of way "back in the day" there was a satellite delivered FidoNet feed for BBSes
That fogged case is really funny, every time you showed it I thought "why is he censoring this?" Like other Gabe's glasses with black line across the eyes, it would be funny to use a physical piece of fogged plastic to censor a video.
Ha! That would be kind of funny. And looking back it's uncanny how much that set top box looks like a blur filter :-P
It was such a relief to get the rain.
Thanks for highlighting this technology- had no idea this was a thing. Too bad about its current state of affairs... oh well.
Great video on an obscure bit of technology that never really moved past obscure (what a shame). IMO their main issue was always moving between birds necessitated users to accumulate yet one more piece of incompatible hardware to keep playing. I was able to round-trip data through the system using the APRS feed that you mentioned and that was fun to achieve. Anyway, thanks for all of the fun videos!
This is a pretty great concept as you say. Something like this doesn't need high bandwidth or low lag, so perfect for an info feed. It would be cool if an open source or community driven system like this came along, especially if it also had some kind of message store and forward function, or even a full BBS. Something like that also shouldn't need much bandwidth. That would help keep people in remote areas connected to the world fairly efficiently. Plus if the satellite was in a higher orbit it wouldn't make astronomers mad like starlink does!
Unless you really like religious channels, “free to air” satellite TV is not exactly desirable.
there's a lot more than religious crap on FTA, but it's too technical for most people to mess with. You need both ku and cband though to get most of the content - a lot is on cband. It used to be a lot more interesting a few years ago when all the live news feeds were still by sat - now it's all by cellular/IP and you can't see any of it.
In northamerica at least.
You can likely hit british tv geo sats at the very edge of newfoundland.
I always wondered if there was anything free to see falling from the sky. Sounds like nothing worth my time. Thanks!
@@LarryBlowers there are a few things to see.
This guy has a few samples and unencrypted broadcasts
Peter Fairlie
OP is Cisco certified and shills Arch
They did introduce some great general use hardware: an rtl-sdr compatible module that was designed to be possibly modifiable and the morpheus combined rf generator | frequency changer. Morpheus is a great device to use as a microwave frequency upconverter and downconverter. They also designed the bullseye high stability LNB which is the goto device for QO-100 satellite reception.
Great episode, Mr. Parts.
Glad you finally found a way to set up your syrup selling shop on the net 👍
The reminds me of the BBS days “PlanetConnect” was a satellite feed for BBS operators. Messages/Files etc
Thanks for sharing. Enjoyed your Mcgyver style improvisation 👍
It was a fun project and had potential. I think one of the ideas was to set up some sort of request site.
So that you could ask for non copyright materials. Books, Music, news. But if you were able to log onto
a website to do this you already have internet and could just do it yourself. Each board version was about 100
dollars. Probably made little on the boards and no income stream to pay for the satellite time.
Could try using the debian archive for the apt sources
how did you comment 6 days ago if the video just got posted?
@@pqlfnvideo is up early for patrons
Wdym? You can't time travel yet?@@pqlfn
@@pqlfnsifp vids start as unlisted videos for patreon supporters
@@pqlfn Supporters get early access.
THEN: "INFORMATION SHOULD BE FREE!" NOW: "Sorry, we don't have enough money to keep this project operating". LOL
Near as I can tell from the Dreamcatcher 3.05 schematics, the LoRA chip is actually used for demodulating the satellite signal! In effect, they're sending a LoRA signal over the satellite. But since there's very little actual documentation, I can't confirm this.
This is correct. They are basically sending an uplink with LoRA modulation. The Dreamcatcher has the LNB do a simple down-conversion to a frequency that is compatible with the LoRA radio so it can demodulate the data signal. They also included a LoRA module capable for re-transmitting the downlink signal locally with the idea that you'll only need one satellite downlink to cover a small town or village.
@@mechmyday- was it only on a satellite with a North American footprint?
I believe they also had coverage in Europe/Middle East. I think it was ArabSAT?
Yy
You just can't find this kind of quality but obscure content anywhere else on the internet.
Pretty cool. Never heard of othernet, but sounds a bit like facebook trying to take over remote areas and giving "free internet" where it's basically just a doomscrolling ad-feed..
PS. I spotted Salvation in your bookshelf.. I'm a huge old Peter F. Hamilton fan, glad to see you enjoy his stuff too. Isn't it just the best? :) What other good books have you got? Maybe you can do a short vid about them for us? Would be interesting.
A bookshelf tour could be fun. I actually need to reorganize my office since the shelves are overfilled.
Awesome video again Gabe, never heard of this idea!
Another video that is so cool! Thank you as always for trying out every crazy idea!
Super cool Gabe. Love your work …
It looks like you found a suitable power supply. For future reference: if you need 5 volts with alot of current you can use the 5 volt rail of an old computer power supply and wire it to a USB plug. If you do go that route don't forget you have short a pin to ground to make the power supply turn on. Just Google power supply pinout. I believe for a 20 pin connector it's pin 14 and 16 for a 24 pin.
Can you explain
@@jasonprivately1764 you can use an old power supply from a desktop pc for 3.3, 5, or 12 volts. You just have to connect a certain pin to ground in order for it to turn on without a motherboard connected. Then you can connect whatever kind of plug you want to the different wires to get whatever voltage you need. I've done it before but its been a while so just google something like 'using a pc power supply for 5 volts' if you want to know more.
Wiring the green wire from the motherboard connector to GND will turn on the psu. You can just put a switch in that circuit and Bob's your uncle!
Does anybody here remember "free world dial-up" , an early adopter voice over IP over the internet thing , they even had phones from Thailand that was voice over IP over Wi-Fi, nobody else did anything like that! It was incredible. You just needed a $300 Cisco router and at least two permanent ISDN connections at maybe a thousand a month. And with that you could have free long distance calls! Great savings!
Of course this was the 90s, and if you spent a few hours on the phone to the nearest city you're getting a $300 or $500 phone bill, so I'm actually serious it would save you tons of money, especially if you had a long distance relationship with a psychiatrist that does their appointments over the phone.
I mean just imagine having the free cash to spend a few thousand dollars on your phone bill and still be able to pay your $300 rent!
I was curious how these work back in a day
Great vid!
Still cool, the fact you can get it working is the best part.
"we've got some sportsball" LMFAO
Super interesting and informative. Really impressed you even got this working. Thank you.
I remember hearing about this when I was into the long range wireless point to point transmission stuff. Good times
It's a damn shame they never found a business model, it was such a neat idea.
There was a Usenet-by-satellite service back in the 90s that I always hoped would resurrect and modernize, and of course there's Toosheh and stuff in the east, but I've never had a chance to scan the feeds in the west and see if there's stuff hidden away in the transport streams.
I heard Toosheh was available in the US but couldn't find it on Galaxy 19, so it may have shut down.
@@saveitforparts Whoah, that would super interesting. When you've had the Winegard units scanning the sky, that's what I always imagined building, a thing that would just autonomously scan and jot down anything out of the ordinary.
Im not sure if it is similar to RPi but I have had to sometimes tell the OS what its DNS server IP was so that it could actually connect to the internet.
For powering high amperage devices like the Dreamcatcher you can hack together an old AT or ATX power supply with a USB cable which has the appropriate end on it. Just cut the USB-A end off and solder the red and black wires to a red and black wire on the PSU you use. With ATX power supplies you will need to jump the green and any black wire together to enable the PSU.
22:30 Wow. That's some early 1990's dial-up bbs nostalgia.
Back in the 90s AP had satellite distribution of data to their Newsroom software. A small dish downloaded AP news to a windows nt server. Can't remember if it was l band or s band.
earlier than that:
1982 - The AP introduces Laserphoto II, the first network capable of transmitting photographs by satellite, as well as over ordinary telephone land lines and microwave links. Designed to facilitate the distribution of photographs in color, the network requires half an hour to transmit three black-and-white separations of the color image, which correspond to the cyan, magenta, and yellow plates used in color printing. Laserphoto II operates side-by-side with the existing Laserphoto network until both are superseded by the PhotoStream system in 1991.
Outernet sounds like a really cool idea, it's a pity it never took off/is shutting down :(
I'm trying to think of a more modern implementation that avoids the expensive/custom hardware issues you mentioned. For the most accessible ground station hardware, I'd imagine a Ku band LNB + RTL-SDR would do it. The first problem would be funding/persuading enough GEO operators to get on board, and then the linked problems of "cheap LNBs drift so needs a wideband signal", vs "funding a wideband transmission is prohibitively expensive".
My bet for the immediate future of this sort of thing is probably LEO LoRA satellites. LoRA RX hardware is cheap, cubesats are cheap(ish). With the right kind of financial backing, user friendly software/hardware packages, and de-bloated downlinks, I'd imagine it could be a pretty effective RX only data service.
Ask Elon Musk (soon to be minister of efficiency in the government) to allow receive only use of StarLink for free. Have communities moderate data to send that is checked for actual facts and not propaganda narrative content. It woud get a lot more people to invest in hardware if some service was available that has a non-recurring cost. Imagine if some Linux distribution were to mirror their data so that anyone in the world had access to a stable OS with standard productivity tools local Mesh Radio protocols without MS Recall and other rights violating BS.
I decree that this deserves to go into the internet archive fellow UA-camrs like to agree
That’s pretty rad, too bad it didn’t get much attention and they couldn’t get funding for it. 😅 I’m sad to see it go. Thanks for putting your time into it!!
Man this is a great idea wish someone would pick this up for future
Decades ago, in Europe, I try to catch data packets with a skystar broadcast satellite tuner card in my pc. The service name was sat torrent, and spread by Astra and Eutelsat satellites, (you send your request via landline dialup internet, and got your data from satellite.). My/our method was: catch the downstream a day, and try to decompile. Mostly pictures from websites, mp3 downloads (unknown singers, unknown songs), and video files (p•rn, and middle eastern preachers speeches). Few month later turn to boring, because the got data was similar. But was fun for a while.
i'm curious: now working same service yet?
I heard of that back when I had satellite internet in Alaska, but I never tried it out!
Yes, I have done that as well, for a while.
Used a "dreambox" satellite receiver that could easily relay a DVB PID to the ethernet interface, and some software that collected downloaded files.
Indeed the users were mainly from middle eastern countries, and the material downloaded was just what you would expect but are not allowed to say.
5:57 Great author, love those books
If you felt like spending the time, you could find ia repository that supports that architecture and manually, edit the source files in that Linux distribution to get an update.
Oh man, I forgot all about this.
Hah. This just reminded me that I have a Dreamcatcher v3.03 I bought 5 years ago and after a lot of fiddling I couldn't get it to pick up a single packet. I had the same experience you did with the included LNA and I figured being up here at 47 degs had something to do with it. So it all went back into a box to be revisited.
That's a shame it's shutting down, although without some sort of philanthropy or grant funding, it was inevitable. It would be tough to get either without some sort of 'strings' attached, considering we're dealing with information for people who can't get it elsewhere. I think the only thing they could do would be Wikipedia-style crowdfunding or maybe even become a wing of Wikipedia, the EFF, or some other group that has some funds and has fidelity of information in their charter.
I used to get rtts teletype over shortwave, had no idea about this. Same feel, just waiting for what might come by.
I would love to see some sort of satellite communication server that the entire community could hop on one day
I've got a question or... I'm wondering... D'you have any idea how the ISP(phone, satellite, cable, ect.) gets online so that they can sell service/access to all of us? Couldn't, for lack of a better term, we just get online that way?
Nice idea, but i think the built-in need for specialized hardware like that instantly makes this only a toy for tech enthusiasts. Shortwave has so much potential still.
Except these days its like every piece of hardware you use is designed to ruin AM, Shortwave etc..
I tried it as a kid and it was great, tried it last year and even the few signals left are super noisy..
Like how you could see the stars 30 years ago from a small city and now you can only see the moon etc..
No idea what is going on, but I love your videos.
honestly that's a great concept
Just curious are you going to participate in this weeks ISS SSTV event? Love your videos!
I'm trying!
thanks for posting this - i wasnt even aware and love SSTV and ISS ! :D
@@alzeNL you got till Monday! I’ve only got 2 clear pictures so far happy hunting!
Thank you for being so amazing on another adventure with technology.Please don't ever stop making content so that we can enjoy it for the rest of our lives
could you do something on those sat tuner pci cards for your computer theres dvb s s2 sx ive got a prof tuner loved it
Man, what a shame that they are shutting down, that's a really cool service. It should be subsidized!
I remember reading about this back in Europe approx. 10 years ago. And it always felt like even Teletext on FTA channels would give you more data/info than what outernet was beaming down to us.
I always thought about buying one, just for fun, but then they went semi-silent and became hard to track down. If i remember correctly they had a office based in Germany somewhere with some outlet out in south Europe, maybe it was Spain or Italy?
I might be totally off tho, its been a while! i even forgot about Othernet until this video xD
Technically it is true that Teletext sent more data, in that it has a higher bitrate than Outernet/Othernet.
However, the Teletext carroussel revolves in only like 30 seconds, or a multiple of that for subpages, while the Outernet carroussel would take hours.
You were supposed to keep the receiver powered on all day, and then once a day or so connect to it and view what it had collected.
That would be a lot more than what you could see at one time on a typical Teletext service.
They were based in the US but they had downlinks in the 3 geostationary areas of the world. In Europe they have been on Hotbird and Astra TV satellites (Ku band) and on Inmarsat (L band). The latter was uplinked from the Netherlands, but they had no office here, only a computer and modulator co-located at the uplink station in Burum.
Many thanks to Greg!!❤
i wonder if one of these dream catchers can be used for radio astronomy as a seti device or something
Also along these lines was Rachel Pi. Basically a school in a box WiFi solution.
hope these critical communication companies opensource their products, they could still profit from after sales support i guess. this is awesome.
6:07 Need to dump that firmware and upload it to the Internet Archive.
wow this is like news paper from space... cool
Cool!
I remember there being some subscription service that seemed to use regular dialup for data from your computer, but satellite DVB-S for the downlink, and the data was sent in clear text. Thus it was possible for anyone to receive it. Given how TCP and HTTP works, it wasn't possible to tell what URL a file came from (except the senders and receivers IP addresses), so in practice you could mostly run it for a while, look at the files and scratch your head wondering what people were doing online :)
Is this still a thing, or if not when did it disappear?
(This was something that could be received from the regular Astra and whatnot satellites in Europe, and IIRC it seemed like the service was aimed at Russian customers, but I might misremember).
BTW although formally "SES" is the correct name, I think that nobody uses that in every day talk; "Astra" seems to be the name used. Or rather I think this still is the case, back in the days (from the initial Astra 1A up to say a decade or two ago) everybody just called it Astra).
I believe there's still one-way and two-way Ka-band satellite internet, but with HTTPS it's harder to just find random files that way.
@@saveitforparts Yes, of course, https messes that up. Don't know if any content are served without https at all today.
3:04 nice temperature change
About 15 years ago (?) there was another initiative from Europe doing almost the same. I used a standard sat receiver in my windows pc and used their software to capture their websites. I forgot the name of thos project - Perhaps someone can respond to this comment.
I remember around that time there was also real internet via geostationary satellites that used a DVB transponder (one PID of a DVB multiplex) and apparently they used telephone modems for the "up"link.
The IP packets on the downlink were not encrypted at all and someone wrote software that assembled complete TCP sessions and stored them as files, so you could see what all the users were viewing....
@@Rob2 Yes, thats right. Do you know what the service was called. I forgot that. Perhaps we can serach the internet for more old info about it.
@@Mr1Spring No, not really...
I think it was on Eutelsat 7east but not sure about it.
It was horrendously slow, I think the total bandwidth was only a couple of Mbit/s and it was shared by many users...
No idea why anyone would want that.
I searched a bit more and it seems that it was SatGate and OpenSky for the service name, the software was (as usually) named SkyNet.
It can still be found on a site named dvbskystar.
I posted details but it was deleted...
It will be interesting to see what can be done with the sdr section, 40-6G is a nice spread. I bet there is a linux utility out there somewhere for it. 👍