I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to networking and comms, don’t ask me why but I’m really into playing with it. I’ve been constantly over the years iterating the connectivity at the caravan. Moving around the van, trying to get a signal in the old 3g days and improving the signal, teathering from a smashed screen ipad 2 in the ceiling to what we have now which is a fully fledged 4G LTE dedicated router because I know the iPad was on it’s last legs but also it could not cope with more than four connections easily at once, it was just not the right piece of kit for the job.
I had been waiting to swap this out for some time and it was not cheap at nearly £100 but thanks to steem I’ve managed to improve my networking and comms for my 4g connection to the web, I had already bought the high gain 4g lte antenna a few months before because that was the cheaper part of the upgrade, probably around £25/30 — so with the wiring and ethernet cables it’s probably gonna be around £150 — not bad to upgrade to a better 5ghz wifi connection, local 100mb lan ports (direct to 4g connection, little bit less latency) and other features like hidden SSID for when we are in a busy area and we don’t want our network getting knocked on.
I was getting about 50% (2 out of 4) bars when I had the other aerials on it and don’t get me wrong they are great but this allows me to place the unit somewhere else and now I’m able to open the roof again because I had it kinda pushed up there outta the way and it was near the cooker and I don’t like that as those two things don’t mix naturally — also wanted a place where I could feed flat ethernet cables into the box away from the ceiling, I think this is gonna work out pretty sweet.
that was always a problem with teathering, the device would take an age to boot up, it had a cracked screen, would freeze up throughout the day and well it never had 5ghz or ethernet connections too, this is a real upgrade from what I had before and I had been struggling with the old way worrying every time I took the iPad out with me because I was scared of breaking the screen even more and then not having a connection to the outside world, if that broke then I would have been screwed so this is a big level up and it means I can finally get a price for a new battery and screen for the ipad 2, think I’m gonna get it fixed and upgrade to the 10.5 iPad Pro in the process.
The external aerial works a treat. I was hoping for like 100% signal if I’m honest but maybe i’ll just get a better connection when I’m out and about, I might even look about mounting it on a bigger aerial when we hit van life, it’s certainly coming with us and the iPad mount for the ceiling is perfect for holding this aerial because it’s light, I was going to velcro it in but it’s a perfect tight fit when I adjust the holder, these holders are like £6, well worth picking one up if you wanna put something high up to get a signal, always try and put your wifi routers as high as possible!
I realise it looks a bit ‘rough and ready’ regarding the installation but it does mean I can now work on the roof panel from a heating perspective, keeping that heat in the van instead of escaping through the roof, need to build a little panel with magnets again to snap into place again, we did attempt it with a panel and while it worked it work too well, the magnets were too strong and pulled the magnetic tape away from the ceiling, at least now I can have another attempt at that.
Not bad speeds for a saturday night prime time and that ping is not gonna be too bad when I’m connecting in via ethernet cables. You really can do everything you need to on a fast 4g lte and it’s only going to get better when 5g wireless is everywhere, it will be as fast as most wired solutions and we will have it spread everywhere, even from space no doubt.
It really is the difference from speaking to the outside world or not, gonna build some redundancy in at a later stage, maybe get a clone setup and another sim from a different 4g provider, you can use software like speedify to bond the connections together for twice the speed if you have enough wifi usb dongles, trust me, I’ve tried it :)
Oh course I did put together a little cracker treat for myself straight after and I’ve got a nice cold can of gin and tonic on the go for a quick job well done, it’s been bugging me for about a week to get that little job done but I’m glad it’s out the way! :)
4g external aerial installation complete! :)
YAYA! Looks fire mouse! Onward and upward literally ;) Those little iterations really add up <3
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When you’re ready for that iPad Pro Bro - holla at ya boy!
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ha! cheers bro ;) might be in and out and about near my birthday! :)
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Lemmi know when so can make sure in bub...I’m always off Monday’s tho!
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An interesting angle of 4g LTE-M technology.
I'm looking forward to reading your input about NB-IoT 5G!
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