While there, I saw what I thought at the time were spoofed access points, including some labeled “Free Public WiFi”.

Fast forward to last week at Normandy Farms. “Free Public WiFi” reared its head again. This time around, it struck me that it might be a virus on someone’s machine that tricks you into connecting to it by posting as an WiFi access point. So I Googled “Free Public WiFi” and discovered it isn’t a virus, but a “feature” of Windows XP.

Dwight Silverman, the tech reporter at the Houston Chronicle, wrote about his experience with “Free Public WiFi” back in 2006here. Supposedly Microsoft was going to issue a patch for it back then.

A more up-to-date article on the “Free Public WiFi” issue can be found here.

In practice, you should never connect to any network under the heading of “ad hoc” unless you or someone you know are the ones who created the ad hoc network. The ad hoc option is for use in the special circumstance of connecting wirelessly a group of computers in the same vicinity to share files.

Windows, unfortunately, connects to any type of WiFi network by default. To turn this off, do the following:

1. Click on the Wireless option in the System Tray and open the Wireless
Network Connection window.
2. Click on “Change advanced settings”.
3. In the Wireless Network Connection Properties window, click on the Wireless
Networks tab.
4. Click on the Advanced button.
5. Click on “Access point (infrastructure) networks only”

Man, it really does work. Accessing everything was quite zippy.

The only problem with it is the 5 gigabyte per month bandwidth cap. For the average person, this wouldn’t be a problem, as 5 gigabytes over 30 days works out to about 167 megabytes per day. But for power users like us, 5+ gigabytes is probably an average month. Today alone Angela downloaded a 67 meg book file and I downloaded a couple of 30 meg covers for her. It will be interesting to see the next bill.

The 3G network coverage extended over our first stop – Normandy Farms – in Foxboro. And good thing too, as the WiFi at Normandy Farms has really gone downhill. When we first went there back in 2004, the WiFi was quite good (though it cost to use it). But this time around, the park’s WiFi (now free) was basically unusable from our site – #613. The signal was fine, you just couldn’t ever connect out to the Internet reliably. A perfect example of why you shouldn’t rely on only one form of Internet access when you need Internet access to run your business.

Rumor has it Bangor will get 3G coverage in the Fall, but I’ll believe it when I surf it.

I’d been hemming and hawing on buying one for some time, but they were more money than I was comfortable spending for such a seemingly extravagant gaget. I mean, after all, you can use Mapquest or Google Maps for free.

And in fact that is what did on previous trips. I’d spend hours calculating routes on Google Maps and printing them out. Frankly, though, it was a hassle compiling the enormous binders of information. And if you missed a turn, you were stuck and had to pull of the road and consult the atlas to get back on track.

Fortunately, several retailers had recently discounted the Nuvi 260 in an effort to clear out inventory to make way for the 260W, which has a wider screen. So I figured the price isn’t going to get any better.

I settled on the the Nuvi 260 for two reasons:

First, unlike the cheaper models, the 260 actually reads off the street names. So rather than saying “Turn left in .1 miles” it says “Turn left on Main Street in .1 miles”.

Second, Garmin has a tool for Macs and PCs that allow you to upload your own POI (Points of Interest) called, appropriately enough, POI Loader. Here is a page describing the program. Essentially, you can use this tool to augment the internal database of the GPS.

I loaded all the campgrounds into the unit that we’d be staying at on the whole trip.

As a side note, one thing that threw me when I first used the POI Loader program is that you can’t just import a file of locations. The file has to be within a folder, and name of the folder is what shows up in your unit. So I created a folder called “spring 2008 trip – first half”, and within that folder I put the actual data file – list.csv. Also, the list of locations is ordered by what is closest to you relative to your current location. So I had to break up all the locations into two lists – going down and coming back (hence the “first half” in the name) to keep the campgrounds we’d be staying at in the later part of our trip from intermingling with those we’d be staying at first.

Anyway, I got it all in and figured no more paper maps. I have to re-think that now, having tested the unit five times now in real-world conditions.

Test #1

Coming down from Bangor to Foxboro, MA, the unit routed us through Boston by taking us down I-95, then off on to the traffic-packed I-93, which goes through the heart of downtown, and then BACK onto I-95 before dumping us into a rural residential neighborhood with some twists and turns. I was sweating it a bit because I didn’t recognize the road at all (we’d been at this campground before).

The unit announced with great certainty that we had “arrived”, when in fact the driveway to Normandy Farms was still nearly a mile away. Fortunately, there were signs to guide us. I took a new reading of latitude and longitude from the driveway of the campground and adjusted my database (it is Latitude: +42.04159, Longitude: -71.28098, in case you are keeping track).

Turns out last time we’d visited we’d come in from the other direction – down I-495 (the half-loop on the west side of Boston) and two turns off the freeway, which seems a lot simpler to me.

Test #2

We went from Foxboro, MA to Black Bear Campground in Florida, NY. Operated flawlessly and got us there without incident.

Test #3

We went from the campground to dinner and, again, it performed flawlessly.

Test #4

We went from Florida, NY, to the KOA in Coatesville, PA. It seemed to route us through a lot of small towns, down highway 202. I estimate all the stoplights and traffic added at least an hour to the trip. But upon consulting the map, I think 202 was probably the most direct route.

Test #5

This test led to our first fight over directions. We decided to go to dinner at a place advertised on the campground’s flyer; which, of course, had a map on it. Me, placing all my trust in the GPS, left the map behind in the RV. We start out taking a wrong turn. No problem. My trusty GPS announces it is “recalculating” in an attempt to fix my mistake. The “recalculation” takes us onto some back roads that turn into closed roads, and then into one-lane roads. Finally, we get routed to a major highway. But a trip that should have taken 10 minutes (the restaurant was 3.8 miles away from the campground) has now taken 30 minutes. And the restaurant was closed, to boot, when we finally got there.

Angie is, of course, silently steaming at this point because I’ve placed so much trust in this gadget rather than a map. I point out that a map wouldn’t have changed the fact that the restaurant was closed. Of course with that statement I walked right into a major faux pas that any married man with experience should know – pointing out the error in a wife’s logic AFTER she is already mad. We left the restaurant, followed the way home we should have followed there, and ate leftovers.

Even with all the problems, I still have faith in the GPS. Angie, of course, will be second-guessing it for the remaining 7 weeks of the trip. It is the little fights that make marriage fun.

We were at the Aces High RV Park in East Lyme, CT. I tried to login into the WiFi system there and my browser hung up as it tried to log me into my account.

I finally figured out it was a problem with the version of SSL my browser was using.

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, and it is the process by which a web browser creates a secure connection between itself and a web site.

The current version of SSL is 3.0, but some sites still use SSL version 2.0. The problem is in the latest versions of FireFox (2.0) and Internet Explorer (7.0), SSL 2.0 is shut off by default.

So to get these browsers to work correctly, you have to turn SSL 2.0 on. Here is how:

Turning on SSL 2.0 in Firefox 2.0

Turning on SSL 2.0 in Internet Explorer 7.0

1.) you connect up to a password-protected access point, your Mac asks you for the password;

2.) you type in what you are sure is the correct password, you can’t connect;

3.) you repeat 1 and 2 until sufficently frustrated, then give up.

You are typing in the correct password, it is just that there are two definitions of “password” depending on what type of access point you are connecting to.

Some background…

Older access points use a form of protection known as WEP, which stands for “Wired Equivalent Privacy”. WEP relies on what is known as a key – essentially a “password”, but written in special 16-digit numeral system known as hexadecimal.

What makes it confusing to non-geeks is that hexadecimal uses the letters A, B, C, D, E, F and the numbers 0 – 9 to represent the values. So the hexadecimal string of characters: CABBED1234 looks just like the English string of characters: CABBED1234 to humans. To computers, however, they mean entirely different things.

When Apple designed their WiFi system (Airport and Airport Base Station), they figured that the average user isn’t going to want to remember a string of hexadecimal characters. So the Mac asks the user for a passphrase – something written in English – then does the conversion to hexadecimal behind-the-scenes.

That solution works fine when a Mac is talking to an Airport Base Station. But access points that use WEP and are not made by Apple only deal in hexadecimal. So when administrators set up a “password” on these access points, they are really picking a hexadecimal-base string of characters.

When a Mac connects to a WEP-secured access point, it assumes what you are entering is a passphrase. It does the conversion on it and tries to pass that converted string to the third-party access point. The connection fails, of course, because the hexadecimal-base string of characters that comes out of the conversion process doesn’t match what was set up in the access point by the administrator.

By putting a dollar sign ($) in front of the hexadecimal-base string of characters, you are telling your Mac, “Hey, what I’m entering is hexadecimal already. Don’t convert it.”

For example, say the “password” given to you is:

abcde12345

You’d enter it this way:

$abcde12345

This problem doesn’t occur on access points using the new WPA form of encryption. But there are still enough access points using WEP that you could still run into this problem.

Here is Apple’s official help page on the subject.

So if it ain’t working, put a dollar sign in front of it.

They system is really a modified version of the DirecPC service sold to homes. They’ve created a special mount for the dish so that it sits on a heavy-duty construction tripod. They also give you tools and software to aim the dish by hand.

The system is marketed primarily to RVers as an alternative to much more expensive units that mount on the top of an RV.

The place we bought it from is Maxwell Satellite. We paid about $1800 for the equipment, and are paying $60 a month for the service.

The bandwidth is 700K down, 128K up. You can get up to 1M down, 200K up if you want to pay $10 more per month.

It works really well for web, email and FTP work. We have a VPN and even that worked good. If you do a lot of telneting, though, you won’t like it. The lag time from the satellite is annoying. I have to telnet to our server and the command line was about 2 seconds behind my typing. Fortunately, I don’t have to type that much, so I can deal with it.

Aiming it was quite frustrating, until I realized I was doing a few things wrong. Then it was a snap. Here is the story.

The first time I set it up was out on our land over the Memorial Day weekend. Setup essentially consists of these steps:

1.) Assemble the dish and level it (using a handy compass/level they include).
2.) Turn on the modem, connect up to it with ethernet, then run the setup software (PC version comes on an included disk, Mac version can be found here). This software adjusts some internal parameters, based on the zip code you enter as your current location.
3.) Reboot the modem.
4.) Open a browser and enter 192.168.0.1 (the default address of router built into the modem). This takes you to the web-based software for actually aiming the dish. You enter the zip code of your current location and the software reports back three numbers you need to aim the dish:

• the elevation – how far up or down you point the dish
• the azimuth – what compass degree you point towards
• the cross-polarization – the skew, or twist, of the dish

5.) You aim the dish according to the above numbers.
6.) You tweak things until you get a lock on the satellite. In order to lock on and work, the signal strength has to be 31 or higher (up to 100). The higher, the better.

Despite my best efforts, I could never get a signal strength above 30. I hauled the dish and all the equipment all over the property trying to find “the right spot”. I even cut down a tree thinking it was blocking the signal.

Hauling everything around was no easy task. Not only is everything heavy, it requires power. Remember, we’re out in the middle of nowhere. I had to cart two 6-Volt golf cart batteries, and a power inverter, to get power to run everything. Here is a photo:

After much swearing and a call to tech support, here are the things I was doing wrong:

First, I was setting the elevation incorrectly because I wasn’t reading the scale right. So the dish wasn’t pointed up high enough. (I could have avoided this by paying attention to the pictures in the manual.)

Second, I didn’t realize there were multiple satellites, and that it was possible to lock on other satellites. The way you know if you are locked on an incorrect satellite is that the signal strength never gets higher than 30, no matter what you do. This is why you have to pay close attention to the azimuth setting, and sweep slowly a little left and right of the initial number the software gives you. If you don’t find the signal within a minute, I was later told, something is wrong.

But these things are fixed when you read the directions and follow the procedures. The thing that isn’t in the directions – and the third thing I did wrong – was I used too long of a cable between the dish and the modem. See, they give you two lengths of cable – one 25 feet long and one 35 feet long. I thought you could combine the two and make a 60 foot cable. Wrong. When the cable gets that long, the signal coming in to the modem is too weak to work.

So the moral of the story is read the manual and use the shortest cable possible.

Once I did those things, boom – a signal strength of 70, and the dish was right outside our RV door.

Now, fast-forward to this trip. I figure “Hey, we have the satellite dish now, we can really stay anywhere – not just parks with WiFi.”

But what I didn’t consider are trees. Trees block the satellite signal. And campgrounds are usually full of them.

I’ve set the dish up 4 times and have only been able to get it working once.

For it to work correctly, you need a clear view of the Southern sky. Actually, up in the Northeast, all you need is a clear view between about 195 degrees and 230 degrees because within that range is where the signal will be found.

Overall, I’m happy with the dish since we are primarily using it on our land, and I know how to make it work there.

But if you are traveling around with one of these, just be aware that trees are the enemy.

We use T-Mobile’s data service as a backup Internet connection when we’re on the road.

Up to this point, the only other provider of EDGE service was Cingular – a service I had a really crappy experience with.

There is also a competing service from Verizon called EDVO. And while faster, Verizon’s coverage is not as widely available as the EDGE technology.

It appears that T-Mobile is offering the higher speed service at the same price as their current service ($30 per month, unlimited access). Only catch is you have to be using a phone that is EDGE-capable. The current PC card they offer is not (neither is the one we have), but two of their phones are: the Nokia 3220 and the Motorola V330.

I hate the way the V330 looks and the Nokia doesn’t have Bluetooth, so I’m going to wait before upgrading. Word on the street is T-Mobile will be offering new EDGE-capable phones at the beginning of the year.

The park is nice. The kids just left to go to an ice cream social at the main building.

Had some trouble with the WiFi. My special antenna rig isn’t working. I think it might be the ethernet bridge – which, for the uninitiated, takes the WiFi signal and sends it to a wireless router we have in the RV. This not only amplifies a weak WiFi signal, but it also allows us to all share one connection.

Amplifying the signal is expecially important at KOA campgrounds. KOA uses Hotspotzz as their WiFi provider. Every Hotspotzz installation I’ve ever seen at a KOA uses just one antenna – mounted on top of the office. Such an arrangement means that you either need some sort of system to boost the receiption, or you need a site close to the office. Fortunately, we’re close to the office here.

The bridge that I think has gone bad is a year old, and the manufacturer has since discontinued that model. They have a newer, smaller one now that is $100 cheaper than what I paid. I’ll have to try and locate one at some point on the trip.

On the way out here we took Route 2, which is pretty much the road from Bangor to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. (It actually goes all the way to Burlington, VT.) Route 2 winds through lots of one-horse towns and forests.

I flipped on MacStumbler – software that looks for WiFi signals – and detected 59 access points. Most of them had no security turned on.

The only one the WiFi was good at, ironically, was one we pulled into by accident.

Apparently it’s becoming fashionable this season to add WiFi to your list of campground amenities. However of the four campgrounds we went to, none of them had good park-wide coverage. We needed to use our home-brewed external antenna just to get a usable signal. And at our final campground, we couldn’t get any kind of signal.

The first place we stayed – Megunticook Campground by the Sea in Rockport, Maine – just had a store-bought wireless router hooked up at the office. We have to move to within sight of the office to get any kind of signal. It was offered and advertised as free, however. So I can’t complain too much.

In the second place we stayed – Wells Beach Resort in Wells, Maine – the WiFi didn’t extent much beyond the office either. Fortunately, they agreed to put us at a site very close to the office and the signal was fine. But the WiFi is essentially useless for doing any serious work unless you can get one of the few close sites, or want to hang out at the office all day.

I think the WiFi problem at the campground we stayed at in Vermont, Lake Champagne Campground, was just a fluke resulting from bad positioning. The park owner showed me the coverage map (when I went to the office to complain) and our site happened to be on the edge of both of the antenna coverage patterns. So we weren’t getting a strong signal from either of the park’s antennas. Unfortunately, they said they were booked up and couldn’t move us. Even with the external antenna, the signal would fade after a while and I’d have to get out and fiddle with the antenna to get the signal back. If you ever stop at this park, stay away from the K section, or sections E thru J.

In the last campground we stayed at, Danforth Bay Camping Resort in Freedom, NH, the WiFi coverage was clearly misrepresented. I drove down the campground’s main road, campsites on either side of me, with MacStumbler running and didn’t pick up a signal until I was almost in the parking lot of the campground office. Yet in their brochure, they have this statement:

“Wireless Internet access is included in your site rate. While wireless Internet service is available throughout the park, we cannot guarantee that each and every site will have adequate signal strength at any given time.”

I know for a fact the WiFi is not available throughout the park because I measured it. And their disclaimer begs the question: Why are they charging you for a service they cannot guarantee?

When we did our first tour last Summer, we didn’t have coverage problems to the extent we did on this trip – and that was a year ago when less was known about how to implement the technology in a campground setting.

I hope this is not the start of a trend – shoddy WiFi installations just so you can claim you offer WiFi. Get professional help, people.

Mike from EVDOinfo.com wrote me this morning about a cool experiment they did using EDVO where they actually transmitted GPS data and were snapping pictures of the locations while driving down the street. What is amazing about this is they are sending it out to the Internet via the cell phone network in real time.

This is a follow-up to their IChat experiment in which they conducted a two-way video chat while driving down the road at 60 MPH.

These experiments bode well for folks like us to want to travel and also have their broadband.