Tents with sleeves - beware some dome style tents
There are some new dome tents coming on ebay that need to be avoided. These are ones that have sleeves for the poles to go through in the main part of the tent. I purchased such a tent.  The problem is they are impossible to put up, my wife and I spent 2 hours trying and gave it up as a bad joke. Recently bush walking I put a friends dome tent up by torchlight in 5 minutes!

The Chinese are usually very good at copying design; in these tents they have completely ignored the basics of dome tent design. A dome tent is normally so easy to put up because the inner tent simply clips onto the poles that have been inserted into pins or holes at each corner of the floor.

The offending tents need to have the jointed poles inserted all the way through the sleeves. In the one I bought this meant 2 poles across each other, and third that goes through the sleeve, all have to be fully inserted before the poles can be located at the corners.

The difficulty of this is compounded that on my tent the poles go through the fly and NOT connected to the inner tent as is the case in "normal" dome tent design. Now the fly has a very odd shape as you can imagine, that makes the whole process incredibly difficult.

Now for the third design fault. As mentioned above, this tent had to have poles inserted before it could be pegged out. Because the poles went through the fly there was no way to know how and where to place the pegs

Although not directly related to design, the company I purchased from had very expensive packing and freight fees AND a ridiculous 25% restocking fee, so it was not even worth returning it.

So stick to the recognized brands and watch out for dubious and expensive selling conditions.