Wifi booster and antenna

[Texasghoul]

I'm looking for the best way to speed up and get a better signal from the free wifi they offer at the park I'm staying at. Any ideas? Thanks guys!

[jungshin]

if you want your own cell based hotspot i bought into unlimitedville a couple months ago. we live out in the sticks and had 750 kbp up and down dsl. i got the sprint plan on unlimitedville for $100.00 a month and have about 2 bars of service and average beween 4-10 mbp up and down. its a small 4G wifi router they mail you . battery powered so i can run it in the rv and carry wifi with us to run the chromecast if we want to.

unlimitedville has connections to all 4 major carriers and bills through paypal. as long as you are not abusive you are good to go. we look to run about 80-90 gigs of data a month what with my DW home based businesses and being cord cutters that just use netflix, hulu and prime as entertainment.

[mgirardo]

At our seasonal site (we live there 4 - 5 months a year), they offer WiFi - good WiFi. However, since I work out of the camper, I need access to my printer and my Network Attached Storage device, so I use a Ubiquiti NanoStation loco M2 to bridge the the parks internet to my router. The first year we were there, the campground did not have an access point near our site, so I had to use the NanoStation to get anything above 3 Mbps download speeds. With the Nano, I was able to get 30 Mbps download speeds. The park does monitor usage as do I. I average about 6 GB usage per month. They have not complained, they just tell me which access point I should point to so they can balance the load. There are others at the campground that do the same thing.

The Nano picks up all of the parks Access Points and lets me know which one has the strongest signal. It also picks up signals from almost a 1/4 mile away when pointed in the right direction. I lock onto that signal and then connect the Nano to my own WiFi router. Then I connect my printer and NAS to my router like I would at home and I have my own network. The Park's WiFi is secure, but using my own router allows for another layer of security, plus allows anyone in our camper to access reliable internet during the season.

If you don't want to bring a full router with you, you can purchase the Ubiquiti airGateway which connects directly to the Nano and turns the Nano into a wireless router. Right now it is on the expensive side. When I bought one it was only $18.

For an idiot proof tutorial on how to set everything up with the Nano, check out Outside Our Bubble's blog post titled Private RV Wi-Fi and Making a Better Park Connection for Under $100.

Some parks do monitor usage, like our Season Campground. If you use too much, they will cut you off. Using an Android TV box at a campground would certainly get you cut off at a park that monitors usage.

-Michael

[RoyB]

Texasghoul wrote:
My android tv box is next to impossible to run on this park wifi! Haha

That was another thing about WIFI hookups everwhere... It looks like a one hour movie or HDTV internet TV link will eat up around 1GB of data... That will add up real quick...

All of the providers play all kinds of games with us users on managing data usage... I have unlimited data on my grandfathered cell phone plans and have to pay what I can a fine for each of my data phone plans. They get around the unlimited part by charging a surcharge for each device...

When you shop around it becomes very difficult to find the provider that will work for you. I was always working all over the US way back off the Interstates and sometimes far from the local large towns. VERIZON was the only provider that worked in those places for sure... Of course VERIZON charges alot for their plans. The most popular now is like 5GB for $50 a month so this really means you will only get to downstream 5 one hour movies or watch Internet HDTV for a couple of hours a day perhaps...

One plan that is looking good is DIRECTV has hooked up with AT&T and you can downstream SAT TV stations over the internet for low or no additional cost... No Dish required... The downside for me is even here where I live in Virginia we have minimun connections for AT&T devices...

To really keep ahead of all of this you need to have a good plan to give you at least 20GB data per month to survive the crunch time...

Go price some of those data deals...

We just recently got a ROKU TV Box here and it makes your TV or Computer Monitor an Internet TV setup... Looks great on my dual 24-inch computer monitors and great sound feeding the monitor HDMI ports. No one needs one of those expensive HDTV setup using this... ALot of free things there but the ones you really want to watch all seem to have a subscription charge... My Local METROCAST Internet Provider gives us a pretty fast setup here at home and we are eating up a bunch of GB's per month using it...

Was thinking like you of trying it on the road but right away I know that is going to be hard to come up with the right data plan to run it... Even if the campground had the capability of running it you know they are not going to allow you to gobble up all of the GB's for your personal Internet TV connection. I have seen signs about this when checking in sometimes. No downstreaming Internet Movies allowed...

Maybe Good Sam will give us RV'ers a special inexpensive SAT LINK to use when we are on the road...

Just me rattling along here hehe...
Roy Ken

[rexabbot]

As a point of clarification, I think you meant 5 MHz not 5 G. That is not a speed but a signal length. The reason is most things ran on 2.4 MHz so there was a lot of interference. You probably had your WiFi signal fighting with something else, that is why it is working good now. In fact 5 MHz is a shorter wave length and doesn't travel as far especially through objects like walls.

Rex '06 VH
Cumming GA

DutchmenSport wrote:
A repeater (booster) will NOT speed up the signal. Actually, it will slow it down. We wanted to get an extender for home, so we could get "faster" signals inside the camper when parked at home so streaming video would quit freezing, which it did not do in the house. The guys from Best Buy said they do NOT increase speed, they actually slow it down. I forget the exact amount, but it was something like 50% slower for each repeater in a chain. So the original would be 100%, the second 50%, the third would be 25% of the original, and so on.

Turned out, our wifi at home had 2 settings. When we flipped over to 5G, we never had any problems again.

This is just something to consider if you are looking for more "speed". You can't get any more "speed" from the original than what it can send and receive, but you will always get degradation.

[Matt_Colie]

Well Texan,

Let me tell you about years of experience of traveling internet. (We used to have to go "Wardriving" to "Find Wire" - if you are that old).

Any shared 802.11(x) is going to be slow most of the time you want to use it. Many commercial sources shut down at closing. The occasion when you can even effective stream even YouTube will get rarer. (FCC 802.11(with a letter for speed) is the basic rule for all Wifi systems.)

I have had high powered 802.11 systems for years, usually Alfa units that do 10 to 20 times the power that an internal system can manage. With the better antennas, they can work access points that are at extreme distances. These do not hurt speed as they replace the internal modem in your computer. I used to carry add-on antennas that made this even better, but reread that second paragraph. It is all lost if you need speed and to do anything more than e-mail. Today's websites are also not designed for anybody with any limits on bandwidth. (Bandwidth - that amount of data you try to move.)

If you have a smart phone and your carrier is Verizon, (check this) then you can now use their hotspot system without buying the app and their data cost has become more reasonable. They also will not shut you down if you run over the allowance, but they will throttle you. You can also pump the plan on-line. Even this does require some planning. You need a phone base in a good location that has to have power to it or the poor phone will crash in short order. There is no way to do this for free, but with proper hardware and plan selection, it can be affordable.

If you are in the habit of being in places with poor coverage, think about getting a repeater to install in the coach. Often called a booster (though that is something that is actually different) these can provide a handset with more radio power and sensitivity.

Matt

[Triker33]

WiFi Ranger not cheap but will help connect to campground weak wifi

The Sky2 Pack has worked great for me.

I mounted the short antenna unit on top of Max air cover and ran wire down through the refrigerator vent. Then hard wired my Genie, Smart TV, Blue Ray and a front Laptop. Used the WiFi to a Desktop.

[Texasghoul]

My android tv box is next to impossible to run on this park wifi! Haha

[Texasghoul]

My android tv box is next to impossible to run on this park wifi! Haha

[Texasghoul]

Yeah I might as well pony up and buy my own personal hotspot. Thanks for the replies!

[DutchmenSport]

A repeater (booster) will NOT speed up the signal. Actually, it will slow it down. We wanted to get an extender for home, so we could get "faster" signals inside the camper when parked at home so streaming video would quit freezing, which it did not do in the house. The guys from Best Buy said they do NOT increase speed, they actually slow it down. I forget the exact amount, but it was something like 50% slower for each repeater in a chain. So the original would be 100%, the second 50%, the third would be 25% of the original, and so on.

Turned out, our wifi at home had 2 settings. When we flipped over to 5G, we never had any problems again.

This is just something to consider if you are looking for more "speed". You can't get any more "speed" from the original than what it can send and receive, but you will always get degradation.

[RoyB]

Keep in mind that WIFI at most parks get loaded down with many users even if you get good reception. I was just reading on here yesterday of a WINEGARD unit that cost around $700 including mounting brackets etc to be used on a RV Motorhome and made WIFI from local areas available throughout the RV. Alot of money spent and still can't depend on the local WIFI HOTSPOT signals.

Winegard WF3000 series


I give up on Campground WIFI a long time ago just for this reason. It became almost useless for me during the 6-11PM time frame. Too many folks trying to use it was the problem... Only time I could get to use the service was usually 2-5AM... using something like VERIZON MIFI type units or cell phone WIFI hot spots that develop their own SECURE and PRIVATE WIFI HOT spots was the best solution for me...

Just saying from my experience...

Roy Ken

[PGCR]

Here is a pretty good blog that talks a lot about this topic!