My first trip with a Durston X-Dome 1+ Pro

Bad Things

Because the poles are outside the fly the length and structure of them is larger than a tradition fly over pole design. It makes it feel like more wild pole flinging around trying to slap into something when trying to (dis)assemble the tent in tighter areas.

Hubbed pole sets are a pain in the but for sure. I have a Nemo Dagger tent with the same “1-Piece” hubbed pole set, and while I like the tent overall, the pole set is the single-worst thing about it by a mile.

I do with the FAD would end. A few months back, I bought a tent with the traditional crossing X-poles, and it is 10x friendlier to setup & break down the poles.

My Nemo DragonFly and several other tents I have used do the double y style hubbed pole. It does have its pros. It keeps all your poles together minimizing the chance of forgetting a pole. It gives straighter end walls over a tradition double wall domes (with or without cross spreader). It also has a good shape once all 4 corners are attached. a 2 pole dome has floppy poles until part of the tent is snapped on or there are sleeves (which I hate). The big negative for me is they are a bit of a huge mess to put together, take apart, and move around assembled.

Overall I prefer what they do for a tent over a traditional straight pole dome, but they can be annoying during assembly and disassembly. So more complicated (dis)assembly, but the assmbled tent is superior.

Glad you’re liking the tent. Here are a few replies:

“With the fly first pitch when opening the door…it can want to pop outward a little bit which makes closing the vestibule harder as you have to pull the sides back together. I don’t see any reasonable way to fix this with stakes as it is basically working with the staking tension doing this.”
A few options here:
1) The interior also holds the pole corners in the proper position, so this shouldn’t occur if the interior is present. If it is still happening a bit, you can shorten the cords a little bit that run across the vestibule to tighten the interior, or you can add a door stake. With those, the fly corners should stay in their normal position and the door is easy to close.

2) Normally you might do a fly first pitch without the interior so the pole corners pop out when you open the door, but then you can open the door and go inside and then as you add the interior from inside it pulls the pole corners to the right positions, so you aren’t actually closely the door while it is relying only on the fly for position.

3) If you were going to just use the fly with no interior at all, then just take out the pole corners so they locked into their positions. You can make the cord loops a bit smaller so you can more precisely control where they are staked.

“Removing the center stretcher ceiling crosspole can be frustrating as the tent is very taught across it”
We have a tip for this in our pitching video. It is much easier to do if you have the other clips disconnected. So do it up early in the setup, and then during takedown undo the other clips first.

“The material is surprisingly translucent and provides minimal privacy. I have used a Tarptent Rainbow Li and it was not this transparent.”
We use the same 0.55oz DCF as Tarptent does, so the transparency should be very similar. They may even use the same color as us now. I suspect what you are seeing here is actually because it is new. When DCF is new the films are more clear so it is more transparent, and then as it gets more creased with age the films whiten and becomes less transparent. So a new shelter will be more transparent than an old one.

“You can leave the interior and fly attached but the points for placing the poles don’t stay together “
I haven’t figured out a nice way to connect them where they stay together while being easy to separate, without adding too much weight. But what customers will often do is just use a little carabiner (e.g the tiny ones from Nite-Ize) or if you do always keep the interior connected then you can tie a little loop of cord.

“Hubbed pole sets are a pain in the butt for sure”
Interconnected/hubbed pole sets can be unwieldy. The reasons I like them are that you never accidentally forget a piece (e.g. crossbar), there’s no risk of accidentally stepping on one pole while you install another, and you set it up without needing to stake it out. If the fly uses clips (easier to erect in high winds) and you have 2 separate archs, the archs tend to be falling over while you try to assemble unless you pre-stake it out.

These work well. Tiny and strong.

Mini carabineers Amazon