I was on the radio today…
…WirelessTechRadio.com, to be exact. Many thanks to Jim Sutton, Marlon Schafer and Steve Stroh for asking me to come on and regale the audience with our WiFi adventures.
Here is a picture of me standing at the phone booth calling into their radio show this morning.
We had a bit of a setback today, as the campground we planned to stay in this weekend is full (lesson learned - call ahead for weekends stays, no matter what the time of year). That means we can’t go to the Renaissance Faire in Maryland. So instead, we are heading down to Virginia.
On the upside, my new toy is working great. I built a home-brew antenna package.
One problem I discovered on the last trip is that some campgrounds seem to only have one access point for their WiFi, usually in the campground office. KOA/Hotspotzz in particular is guilty of this.
So I took a Hawking Technology Hi-Gain antenna, a wireless Ethernet bridge, and a power-over-Ethernet adapter, packaged it all inside a Tupperware container to keep the elements off the electronics, and then mounted the whole package on to a camera tripod.
I then bought 100′ of Ethernet cable so I could basically position the antenna package anywhere outside the RV that I needed to.
I’ll run the Ethernet into a wireless router inside the RV, which lets me convert the connection back into a wireless signal inside the RV.
It lets us get a more consistent signal inside the RV, and allows us to share the connection more easily, since this trip out the kids are in school and we need to let 4 computers share the connection.
I’m still testing it. When I’m finished, I’ll post pictures, a materials list and details on operating it in case anyone out there wants to build one.