The other day I built a parabolic reflector out of cardboard and some foil tape I had lying about. I was researching various homemade antenna designs I want to tinker with and stumbled on one that I actually had all the parts for on hand. As we are so close to the edge of EVDO reception here that moving down the hill a few feet would kill the signal, it seemed like it would be worth a shot. After all, it cost maybe fifty cents for the foil tape I used and the cardboard was free.

Now, this is hardly a good mobile solution as it’s fairly directional, but after spending twenty minutes or so on the roof pointing the reflector and testing bandwidth, I got pretty good results. The SNR increase doesn’t even register on the cradlepoint’s web interface, which is fairly lackluster, so I had to result to ping flooding our upstream router to detect a better signal. No, I didn’t DoS it, I kept the packet count to 100 at a time while aligning and 1000 packets for bandwidth testing.

I didn’t record all the numbers, but to give you an idea of the improvement: without the reflector, we were seeing 10-30% packet loss and average roundtrip times that ranged from 5 seconds to 9.5 seconds. Even at that, the connection was usable. Once the reflector was aligned, packet loss dropped to 0-1% and average roundtrip times stayed about 2.5 seconds. This equates to a 100-300% increase in bandwidth plus the bandwidth recovered from dropped packets.

The connection is hardly blazing fast, but it’s quite a bit more usable than previously. For our normal usage patterns, it’s actually quite acceptable. Bear in mind that our average roundtrip times are similar to 380ms. The previously stated times are for icmp packets being sent out as fast as possible and saturating the connection.

With that sort of improvement, I’m much more determined to build a waveguide antenna for times when we’re having trouble hitting a tower. Bonus points if I can fit both the wifi and 3g spectrums into the same antenna and use it for a wifi repeater as well.

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Not to be outdone, Jenn has been working on freecampsites.net quite a bit. I’ve tried to help some, but my PHP is very rusty and the codebase is quite large. I think she may have gotten a small taste of my frustration last night. Since she has expressed at least a passing interest in my game, I talked her through adding a couple of features to the codebase while we were driving to Quartzsite!

I was impressed. As a C neophyte, she was still able to extend my existing functions as well as find and patch a bug while listening to my disconnected ramblings of where the problem was most likely to be. All of that, and my program still compiles and runs this morning! I’m only sorry that I couldn’t talk her into finding a bug in the display code I spent a few hours trying to find yesterday. But, that code is probably overly complex and due for some cleanup. Hell, I get annoyed looking at it and I wrote it within the last week!

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What do you get when you combine one of Jenn’s favorite games (Railroad Tycoon) and the RV lifestyle? You get a railroad car fitted out for fulltiming! That’s just what we found as we were passing through Jefferson, Texas a couple of weeks ago. The Garden Club has acquired the personal car of Jay Gould, a railroad tycoon, and restored it to something close to it’s original splendor.

The car had four staterooms for passengers, two of which were adjoining with a bathroom, including tub and shower between them. The others all had their own plumbing, even if a bit primitive by modern standards. There was a couch as well as a pullman bed in each of the staterooms. The car would be able to take on water at the same water depots that the train used. We didn’t ask, but I assume the black and gray water would have been simply dumped along the tracks as soon as it was generated.

There were two rooms devoted to cooking with a pass through between them. Based on the layout, I would assume that the car originally had bunks for two servants, but only one of the kitchen cars still had a pullman berth at the ceiling. The icebox had something I think we could all use today, a glass door. How often have you opened the fridge and stared at what was there while deciding what you wanted?

In addition to the above mentioned rooms, the car also had an observation/lounge room and a dining/office room. Many RV’s today have a table that fold out from the wall with a leg that folds down to support the table. The design is more than a hundred years old! Jay Gould’s car had slots along the side where a table with a folding leg could be secured to place a table wherever it was needed at the time. The observation room included a speedometer so that Mr. Gould could see how fast the train was moving and call the conductor if he wanted to go faster. Apparently, Jay Gould was often in a hurry to get somewhere.

The entire car was lavishly appointed with a different decor for each room. How much of this is original is hard to say, but the Garden Club has done an excellent job recreating what must have been a very high class conveyance in it’s day. You can still see the original mother of pearl buttons to summon servants and the glass fixture with Jay Gould’s signature jay bird, which he would draw when signing his first name.

If you’re ever in Jefferson, I recommend taking the tour. It’s cheap and the ladies will tell you all kinds of stories about Jay Gould and how he was connected to the town during the heyday of the railroad. The town also has some interesting ‘antique’ shops full of all kinds of junk and a hotel that dates back to the days of the wild west. Overall, it’s a gorgeous small town with a nice drive along the Texas Trails system if you’re tired of the interstate route.

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Well, I bought us a Avertv Hybrid Volar Max for Christmas. We’ve only just been using it the past few days, but I’ve got to say I’m quite happy with the functionality. I really expected HDTV to be much less reliable for us compared to analog TV as we’re often out in the middle of nowhere.

So far, we’ve been able to pickup more HD stations than analog stations. On top of that, we often get two or three channels from the same station. A PBS station with three channels running is quite nice as I’m not always interested in what the main channel is broadcasting. The main difference between our HD experience in a house versus a camper is the external, pointable antenna and the signal amplifier built into it. In the metro Orlando area, we were getting maybe six to eight channels with a pair of rabbit ears. Now, more than 60 miles from Tupelo, MS, we’re getting ten channels, even if a couple of them are kind of spotty when the storms roll in. Regardless of how many HD channels we get, I’m still going to be a little annoyed on Fed 17th, June 12th, or whenever they finally complete the cutover. The easiest way to point the antenna is to find an analog channel and try to tune it in before scanning for HD channels!

One of the most surprising things for me is that the USB tuner actually works quite well with my ultra-lightweight tablet PC. The processor is a mere 1.2ghz pentium mobile (1.8ghz mobile processor is recommended) and the HD channels still work quite well. Initially, I thought some of the jerkiness and pauses I was experiencing were due to CPU bottlenecking, but after changing locations, I found we were able to pickup high resolution channels just fine with the smaller laptop, so it was more likely a signal strength issue.

Obviously, we don’t bother with the timeshifting functionality as that would require a lot more electricity and constant reprogramming as we move around. I also could care less about recording shows. I’ve built full featured MythTV boxes, and unless I can auto-crop out commercials, it’s not worth the effort or hardware. I do rather like the electronic program guide though. I’ve just discovered that feature today and already decided what I’ll be vegging out to over dinner tonight.

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Being with family has been great. It was nice to be able to spend the holidays with loved ones. What is Christmas w/o excited little children ripping open presents? My relatives provided that and much more. Roasted lamb, spiced eggnog, rum cake, holiday cheer, and much more. We have had some nice times while we have been here and really appreciate their concern and hospitality. We will miss them for sure. But, now its time to ramble.

I really wanted to get the website live before we hit the road again. Being on the road can provide a lot of wonderful distractions, and I wasn’t sure that I would get it done otherwise. The possibility of no Internet access would have put a damper on it, too. Once I got it online, it was very well received. By most folks anyway. There are a one or two people, namely pianotuna and dumolebob, who have taken an active interest in the site. Many thanks go out to them. The other users have been keeping me busy with features and requests, too. Its great.

Hooray! We are almost germ free. I was worried that I was going to have to go get some antibiotics. Thankfully, 1 1/2 weeks later, we are almost healed! I can’t remember the last time I was (flu type) sick. Johnny got over it pretty quickly. For me, it got worse every day. Finally, yesterday was so bad I couldn’t even sit up to use my computer. Today, I fell 70% better. I am still pumping the hot fluids into my body. Hopefully it will be 100% gone tomorrow.

The good news is I am feeling well enough to get us ready to leave. The bad news is that there are going to be strong/severe thunderstorms for the next few days followed by freezing temps. Fun.

Well, I must be off. I have lots to do.

Best of luck to eveyone in this new year.

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Here is my present to all!

FreeCampsites.net

A database of free and inexpensive RV compatible campsites and boondocking locations. It is completely user driven. RVers like you and I input the location and the data. I know its a bit sparse at the moment… so you should get busy .

I know, there are a few of these out there already. But, many of the ones that I saw are missing some basic features that I have included, and their interfaces are a bit difficult to work with. I am sure there are some things that I need to work on too. I am open to suggestions.

Many thanks to The Dead One and Cyberhobo for their plugins and patience.

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So much for being on an extended vacation. For the last couple of days I have been completely engrossed in building a new website. I have fallen back into my old habits of staying up all night and coding, getting some sleep, grabbing some coffee, and coding some more. Ah, just like the good old days. The ones before the corporate machine killed any enjoyment that that behavior gave me.

Back in those days, Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal didn’t exsist. You (I) did everything by hand. You wanted a web based file manager, a web based mysql manager, or a bulletin board? You wrote it. Now, we have all of these wonderful content management systems with tons of great plugins. But, they come with their own head aches too. You want a certain kind of functionality? Time to start hacking.

Thank god for open source.

Tonight I ran into that situation. From what I have read, a lot of other people have too. So, I decided to post my solution in hopes that it helps some one else.

TDO Mini-Forms and Geo Mashup become friends.

Problem: I had decided to use TDO mini-forms, which is great, but they don’t support Geo Mashup. After seeing that there wasn’t a solution, I decided to dig through the source code. Here’s what I came up with:

This write up assumes that you have TDOMF and Geo Mashup installed on Wordpress.

Getting the map form to show up on your submit page:

It was very simple to get the map to show up in the TDOMF form and populate. All I did was look at the source of the admin write post screen, paste the code inside the <div id=”geo_mashup_admin_edit” class=”postbox “> tag, copy it into a file (that I created) named geomap.php inside the plugins/tdo-mini-forms/include/ folder. Then, I included the file via the core form area of the form hacker. Now I have a fully functioning map, just like in the normal post editor. When you click that map, it populates the $geo_mashup_location (which Geo Mashup uses to populate the _geo_location field) and TDOMF submits it.

Here’s a snippit from the core form section of my form hacker:

<!– customfields-8 end –>
%%WIDGET:append-1%%
<!– widgets end –>
<?php include(“geomap.php”); ?>
<!– form buttons start –>
<table class=’tdomf_buttons’><tr>
<td><input type=”submit” value=”Preview” name=”tdomf_form1_preview” id=”tdomf_form1_preview” onclick=”tdomfSubmit1(‘preview’); return false;” /></td>
<td><input type=”submit” value=”Send” name=”tdomf_form1_send” id=”tdomf_form1_send” onclick=”tdomfSubmit1(‘post’); return false;” /></td>
</tr></table>
<!– form buttons end –>

Sweet! Now,we can now submit the data. That’s all well and good, but if there’s nothing to handle it on the other side it, doesn’t do us much good. So, let’s add some code to deal with it.

Dealing with the submitted data:

I opened up plugins/tdo-mini-forms/admin/tdomf-edit-post-panel.php and added the following on line 259 inside of the function tdomf_save_post() function:

if (isset($_POST['geo_mashup_location'])) {
add_post_meta($post_id, ‘_geo_location’, $_POST['geo_mashup_location']);
};

The code now looks like this:

function tdomf_save_post() {
$post_id = (int) $_POST['post_ID'];
if($_POST['tdomf_flag'] == “false”) {
delete_post_meta($post_id, TDOMF_KEY_FLAG);
tdomf_log_message(“Removed post $post_id from TDOMF”);
die(“alert(‘”.sprintf(__(‘TDOMF: Post %d is no longer managed by TDOMF!’,'tdomf’),$post_id).”‘)”);
} else {
add_post_meta($post_id, TDOMF_KEY_FLAG, true, true);
if (isset($_POST['geo_mashup_location'])) {
add_post_meta($post_id, ‘_geo_location’, $_POST['geo_mashup_location']);
};
if(isset($_POST["tdomf_user"])) {
$user_id = $_POST["tdomf_user"];
delete_post_meta($post_id, TDOMF_KEY_USER_ID);
add_post_meta($post_id, TDOMF_KEY_USER_ID, $user_id, true);
tdomf_log_message(“Submitter info for post $post_id added”);
die(“alert(‘”.sprintf(__(‘TDOMF: Submitter info for post %d updated’,'tdomf’),$post_id).”‘)”);
} else {

Your mileage may very. I hope it helps!

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Hey guys,

Currently working my way through your all your postings. My wife and I are in the “can we really do this” stage of making the same change that you two have. Very much enjoying reading through your process.

Much like you two, we both work in technology and are somewhat dependent on the Internet. Add to that, the need for research / blogging / and potentially some work while traveling and connectivity gets to be one of our important decisions. So I’m curious, how are you feeling about the cell network decision versus satellite? Working out as you had planned?

Brent

Well, Brent, I’d have to say I don’t like any of the choices available. I’m pretty happy with the performance of EVDO, but I’m extremely upset with Sprint changing the contract midstream so that it no longer remotely resembles the class of service that we originally purchased. I have already ranted about this particular event once, so I’ll try and stay on subject…

For in-motion internet access, I don’t think you can beat EVDO in the US. EVDO also trumps satellite systems for setup times as there is no setup at all, or in our case, we roll up the television antenna to get a bit more height from the cellular antenna once we’re parked. There is no trying to make sure your dish has an unobscured line of sight, etc. EVDO is also superior to satellite internet in terms of bandwidth and latency. You just can’t get around the speed of light time lag when you’re acknowledging a packet… the further the physical distance, the longer it takes.

Now, satellite has a few nice things going for it as well. You don’t need to be near a cell tower for starters. You can also get a clear line of sight to the sky when mountains would otherwise block cell towers. If you have money to spare, then a motosat installation would take a lot of the headaches out of setting up your satellite dish. Just flip it on and let the machinery lock onto a bird.

If you’re going to be in really remote areas and can’t be without Internet access for extended periods, then satellite is pretty much your only choice. If you can handle being offline for the occasional two week period and hauling a laptop into town to look for wifi hotspots, then EVDO is a pretty good choice with a much lower startup cost and lower monthly fees (I think!).

In a perfect world, I’d opt for an EVDO router as well as a satellite system. I’d settle for a standard satellite system as I’d only be setting it up when we were going to be parked for a week or so without cellular access. However, in the real world, I’m not about to pay for two different kinds of internet service just in case.

Now, back to my favorite rant… metered bandwidth. You can’t get away from it. The satellite companies do it as well as all the EVDO carriers. 5GB seems to be the gold standard for EVDO currently. Yes, that’s slightly more than a 14.4kbps dialup circa 1990. I’m not sure what kind of bandwidth the satellite folks are being allowed to enjoy, but I haven’t heard of any satellite companies charging overage fees. The last I heard, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are all charging overages on new contracts. To the best of my knowledge, they are all pretty exorbitant… just as with cellular minutes.

Ten years ago, it was the web hosting companies that charged exorbitant overage rates and sky high pricing for a trickle of storage and bandwidth. The ISPs of the day all charged a flat rate whether you checked your mail once a month or spent the entire time downloading movies. These days, server space and bandwidth cost pennies, but end-user ISPs are limiting bandwidth, connection time and even charging overages. Funny, huh?

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I really love the idea. It could solve a lot of the authentication issues that I have created for myself after using about 30 different username/password combinations and a number of email addresses @ different domains in the more than 10 years (more like 12+ now, but I still say 10+ for some odd reason) I’ve been in the computer industry and on the Internet. Every once in a while, I spend about 3 days trying to log in to a site that I haven’t visited in 2 years. That can be very annoying. If I only had one ID, it would save a lot of hassle.

It has some issues however. The linked article does tend to rely on FUD, but it is a concise list of the issues and a good starting point for those who are interested in them. I started to go into them here, but I decided that they have already been rehashed enough on various forums, web logs, and mailing lists.

There does seem to be a future for OpenID, and a good deal of the problems mentioned can be thwarted by being your own OpenID provider. I might re-investigate its usefulness at a later date. For now, I will leave it to the brave.

From OpenID.net:

How do I get an OpenID?

Surprise! You may already have one. If you use any of the following services, you already have your own OpenID:

AOL

openid.aol.com/screenname

Blogger

blogname.blogspot.com

Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/username

LiveDoor

profile.livedoor.com/username

LiveJournal

username.livejournal.com

Orange (France Telecom)

http://openid.orange.fr/

SmugMug

username.smugmug.com

Technorati

technorati.com/people/technorati/username

Vox

member.vox.com

Yahoo

http://openid.yahoo.com

WordPress.com

username.wordpress.com

Find additional providers here!

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It turns out that our new campsite wasn’t quite as deserted as we had hoped. Every couple of hours this Hummer drives by with a tour group. Since they never come back down past us, I assume they’re just driving a loop through the national forest. A few other folks drive by on occasion, but for the most part, they don’t slow down and point.

As we hadn’t been out for a hike in a while, we decided to hike up one of the less improved roads to the top of the mountain. We were keeping an eye out for a new campsite, hazards we might have trouble crossing with the camper and halfway hoping we were on the right road to reach the lookout tower.

After a two or three mile hike over increasingly steep roads that were in worse shape the further we went, we finally found the end of the road. Apparently this is the cell tower we’re

pulling our EVDO signal from. I was halfway tempted to move the camper to the top of the hill and park under the cell tower, but the scenery was ruined by the power lines and tower itself. Besides, there wasn’t anywhere to park that wouldn’t be blocking access to the tower if someone came up to work on it.

So much for finding the lookout tower. But with cutting the road and several right of ways for redundant power, the generator, several locked sheds and a mini weather station (zoom in on the small pole sticking up above the fence at the base of the tower), we thought we understood why our cellular bills are so high!

As it turns out, the phone company that stuck that up there probably got a cut rate deal. The power company probably stuck it to them, but the forestry service had already built the road and created the clearing at the top. This is actually the former site of the lookout tower. It was removed in 1993. So, I guess we found it after all, or as close to it as we can get without a time machine.

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Jenn and I (read that as mostly Jenn), spent the past three days getting our new Wordpress blog and gallery off the ground, importing the old blogger posts, cleaning them up a bit, and troubleshooting everything under the sun as upgrades and dependencies collapsed left and right.

You may now bask in the glory of the new blog. No touching!

There’s still a ton of work to get it where we want it, so try not to break it. That means you.

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After working over a decade in the industry, we’re officially internet junkies. We use it for everything: Researching campsites, routes, fuel stops and sightseeing trips. Entertainment, banking, paying bills, investments. And today’s favorite topic: the life and times of the garden variety yellow jacket.

On top of our normal uses, we were trying to complete the interview for Truck Camper Magazine via email. So every couple of days, we’d hop on the moped and ride into Highlands, where we would sit around sipping coffee at Sweet Treats and try to get a few things accomplished. Even in the middle of town, the best we could manage was public wifi and a few phone calls as long as we stood on one leg and lifted the opposing arm straight out.

We had some things piling up that required a bit more secure connection than the free wifi at the coffee shop, so we reluctantly left our site and planned our route based on Sprint’s EVDO coverage map. We swung through Franklin to get some hardcopy maps from the ranger station since it’s nearly impossible to find internet maps of forest service roads and then headed into Sylva because Sprint claims to have coverage there.

The plan was to find a nice campsite near the Sylva area in the national forest, but after an hour sitting in a parking lot downtown, with the antenna rolled up and the amplifier sucking juice just to deal with a handful banking and investment transactions, we didn’t feel like we were going to find a nearby campsite that was both serene and had EVDO service if we could barely manage 1xRTT downtown.

Here, our forest service maps came in handy. We found a likely looking spot in the Pisgah National forest that was close to I-40. We had been planning to take that route to reach our rendezvous with Jenn’s parents at the end of the month, so it’s not really out of the way; just ahead of schedule.

To make a long story short, we’re sitting about five miles down a windy forest service road, at the top of a mountain in a deserted area. It’s not quite as picturesque as the intentional sites the forest service has manicured, but we have one bar of internet ALL TO OURSELVES! We need to get some work done on the blog version 2.0 and lots of pictures need to be uploaded to the forthcoming gallery.

Hopefully you’ll be hearing more from us this weekend as it’s supposed to rain Saturday, so we should have plenty of time for playing on teh intranats.

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Verizon has a slightly better coverage footprint than Sprint, at least the way most people seem to figure it, but Sprint had one major benefit: unlimited connectivity and downloads. Verizon claims to have ‘unlimited connectivity’, but after 5GB in a month, they start charging you $0.49 per MEG!

It seems that someone over at Sprint has decided that too many people are using their aircards too much. They’ve started sending out bills stating that within thirty days, a 5GB cap will be introduced to their service as well. Yes, they word their contracts such that they can change them on the fly. Yes, they are allowing people to leave without an early termination fee if they cancel within sixty days of notification. Do I think that changing contracts midstream is completely kosher? Nope.

Theres a 30+ page rant running over at the evdoinfo forums. What it all seems to boil down to is:

1. Yes, this is for real.
2. No, there is not much real information out there regarding the implementation.
3. Maybe you will talk to a Sprint CS rep that has heard of the upcoming changes.
4. No, you will not get the same story twice from Sprint CS.

Currently, the FCC defines ‘broadband’ service as download speeds of 768kbps or greater. Some back of the envelope math tells me that if you are actually receiving the minimum speed to be defined as broadband, you can exceed 5GB in slightly over 15 hours. If you actually get the theoretical peak speed of 3.1 mbps for EVDO Rev A, you run out of bandwidth in under four hours. By contrast, a 56k dial up can download about 15GB in a month. The FCC seriously needs to revise the definition of ‘broadband’ to include something other than how fast you can reach the cap and get disconnected, throttled or charged extra for each byte of information.

Me? I’m looking at Alltel. Their coverage map has some holes in it, but just maybe I can keep using the antenna and amplifier I’ve shelled out for and stay connected. At least until they decide a 5GB cap sounds good also. I almost miss the 14.4 modems of yore. At least they were honestly unlimited even if they did have a 4.45 GB cap built in.

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Today, in the midst of working on a half dozen things and finishing none of them, I managed to temporarily frag our Cradlepoint (the EVDO/wifi access point). Now, there was nothing wrong with the device that clearing my browser cache wouldn’t fix, but it took a call to tech support to have the obvious pointed out to me. Cradlepoint has an excellent support team by the way.

Anyhow, in the course of troubleshooting, one of the steps I took was to upgrade to the latest firmware (2.1.0). I was happily surprised to find that our little $100 router has at least one new feature added. It now supports the GPS functions of the newer EVDO cards! Luckily, I spent a couple of extra dollars for the Novatel U727 (with a shiny GPS) back when I still had a real job.

Rather than rehash my thoughts on these devices and their usefulness and occasional lack thereof, I’ll let you read about it here if you are so inclined.

Here’s a run down of the snazzy new features. There is a GPS Tools page in the administrative interface. On this page you can see your current longitude and latitude. Additionally, you can set the page to open a new browser window and keep your current coordinates updated in google maps, yahoo maps or mapquest. Finally, you can turn on a network port that will spit out NMEA format GPS coordinates.

This last bit interested me. We keep a gps dongle in the truck, but it can be a hassle to use it at times. With a bit of looking around, and fearing I’d have to write the code myself, I found com0com and com2tcp. Between the two of them, I was able to create a tcp connection that could masquerade as a com port for all intents and porpoises. After banging my head against DOS’s crackheaded batch files, I finally got a batch file that sets up the com2tcp connection and launches Streets and Trips. I don’t have to bother plugging in a GPS receiver… or look for one for that matter. As an added bonus, Jenn can use the same GPS with her laptop at the same time!

One caveat to this setup if you try it at home: use a com port that is below COM20. Streets and trips had issues with this while Netstumbler did not.

Oh, and one bonus that showed up in the previous firmware update. The ethernet port on the Cradlepoint CTR-350 can now be switched between WAN and LAN. There’s no more mucking around with WDS to get our NAS online. Simply switch the port to LAN and plug directly into it. Transfers are wifi speed, but most of the time it’s preferable to digging out the switch, plugging it in and dragging a laptop over to physically plug in for ethernet speeds.

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Last night, I finally found the reason I was having so much trouble getting WDS to work between the cradlepoint 350 abnd the linksys running openwrt. Apparently, WDS support was completely broken on the cradlepoint prior to firmware 1.7. So if WDS is beating you, check your firmware version on the cradlepoint. Once the firmware was updated, WDS was pretty easy to get setup.

Why do we need WDS? Well, a few years back, I bought a ReadyNAS. It’s an extremely nice little NAS with enough features to be useful in a mid-sized datacenter. It supports wifi, but not very well. I finally got a wifi card that would work, but only with WEP and it still had trouble actually talking to the network.

To sum up my opinions:

Cradlepoint is a nice EVDO/wifi router at a very reasonable price. It has support for all the basics you would want in a personal firewall. It isn’t going to support site to site VPN mapping, but it will handle traffic shaping, ACL’s, NAT and special case protocols that require a bit more than standard NAT such as SIP, RTSP and VPN clients. It also has a few features that are neat, but are just unneeded for our application such as scheduled ACL’s and registering with dynamic DNS services.

The U727 EVDO dongle and Sprint service is still working great. We’ve recently hit speeds as high as 1.2mb. External antenna connectors are still very hard to come by, but once we get one, I expect to have even fewer problems.

The Linksys WRTSL54GS is just plain overpowered with 8MB of flash, 32MB of RAM, a 264mhz processor and a USB port for expansion. It’s more powerful than my first UNIX box by an order of magnitude.

OpenWRT is still not quite ready for prime time. There are a ton of things you can do with this firmware on the Linksys router platform, but the GUI needs a lot of work before it will be useful for the average person. Currently, it’s an excellent solution for the hobbyist or small businesses that have someone geeky enough to support it. We’ve been using OpenWRT for about 2 years now without any real complaints other than the initial setup requiring a fair bit of research to do anything slightly complicated.

The ReadyNAS platform is very robust. After nearly two years, the only real complaint I have is that the wifi support is almost non-existant. With advances in open source NAS software, I might build my own NAS next time, but I caught the ReadyNAS on sale at Newegg a couple years back and the cost was only about $150 more than the hard drives alone. For 700GB of RAID5 storage, it’s a pretty good solution. I plan to upgrade it to about 3TB of raided storage once the 1TB drives come down a bit more. So far, it has worked quite well for both windows file sharing and NFS. I’ve also done a bit of web based file sharing and been pleased with the added accessibility of my data.

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We’ve canceled cable television and internet service. There’s still way more television being broadcast in the area than we really need. Quite frankly, I wish we watched even less television than we do.

For internet we’re using Sprint’s wireless data service. We have the new Novatel U727 usb modem. One of it’s big selling points is the built-in GPS. Unfortunately, the GPS is pretty lousy. Most of the time, you can’t even get it to lock onto satellites in a vehicle. Perhaps it would work better in the open air, but I rarely walk around with a laptop and actually need a GPS.

At least the internet service works pretty well. It took some fiddling with the EVDO settings and finding a good place to put the router, but we’re getting about 800kbps downstream. There is not currently an external antenna cable available for the U727. Hopefully it will take less trial and error with locations once we can permanently mount an antenna on the outside of the camper.

I’ve been very happy with the EVDO router. Its a Cradlepoint C350. It acts as a wifi hotspot and NATs the IP address that Sprint assigns. The interface is pretty intuitive and packed with a ton of features. The only real problem we’ve run into is trying to get WDS to work properly between this router and the Linksys access point we’ve been using. Since the C350 is wifi only, a fair portion of our network is currently unable to reach the internet. We’re making due with a couple of PCI wifi cards I had laying around from another project and multi-homing our workstations so we can still reach the NAS.

Switching ISPs has forced us to move along with some other things as well. The biggest one so far has been relocating our email and web toys to a domain hosting company. For the past ten years or so, I’ve run all the services for my vanity domain and Jenn has done the same with hers. Its a bit of a change letting someone else deal with all the root level things and rather frustrating when you have an issue that you could solve in five minutes if it were your box but instead have to ask someone else to look into.

We’re using Hostgator as our domain host and so far I’ve been very impressed with their customer service as they dealt with some dumb questions and some more esoteric technical issues.

The other big thing we need to deal with is our phone service. We have VOIP through our company, but we’re planning to switch to Skype. I’m still in the process of researching wifi VOIP phones. I also haven’t been overly impressed with Skype’s website interface or their customer support when we ran into some website problems. Hopefully we can resolve that issue and get set up. In the meantime, we’ll use cell phones for a bit longer.

The last bit of setup this week has been our mail forwarding service. We’re using Good Sam’s mail forwarding service. So far, it’s been a nightmare to get set up and taken far longer than I expected. If you want to use Good Sam mail forwarding service, save yourself a lot of headaches and just call them instead of trying to sign up online.

It’s been a pretty hectic time for us as we try to get all of this sorted out. There’s still a ton of things to do before we get as far as moving into the campground for a few months. As I have more time, I plan to go into a bit more in depth review of the products and services we’re using. In the meantime, if anybody is using a good wifi phone for Skype, let us know about it!

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On the power side, we’re going to start with 380 watts of solar panels. These are big honking 3′x5′ 24 volt panels, so we can only fit two without some extra work. If we find we need more watts, there is a possibility of putting a third panel without any major modifications or wiring smaller 12V panels in series for 24V. We will probably be supplementing this with a small generator – I still haven’t decided on a 1000W or a 2000W. Either should run the A/C, so I’m leaning towards the smaller genset for weight and efficiency reasons.

For power storage, we’re going to start with at least 4 12V group 31 batteries. These pack roughly 120Ah each. I’m still up in the air on AGM versus regular old lead acid. The AGM cost about twice as much, but should charge a bit faster and have the capability to be mounted upside down and sideways as well as indoors. The deciding factor may end up being how much junk we are going to haul outside versus inside. A battery stored indoors will have less Ah lost during cold weather, so indoor AGM’s would be a nice way to go.

For internet service, we’ve started looking more closely at EVDO service instead of satellite. From reading other people’s opinions that have the service, it seems that they fall into two groups: those that have spent money on an external antenna and amplifier and those that have not. For the most part, those with amplifiers and antennas are pretty happy with the service. Of the few that are not, it is generally because they feel it is too slow in some areas. Jenn and I are no strangers to slow internet service, having been working in the field since the days when 19.2kb was blazing fast. I still tend to use a text only web browser about half the time.

There is a lot to be said for having no setup time once we pick a campsite. I also like the ability to have internet access, and therefore, VOIP phone service when we’re rolling. From what I’ve seen, for the cost of a bottom end satellite system, we can have a top of the line EVDO setup including a router that will accept an air card for connection sharing, an amplifier and external antenna. At the moment, I’m leaning towards Sprint because they offer unlimited downloads and appear to have excellent peering with both Verizon and Alltel. I’m just not crazy about Verizon telling me I’m limited to 5GB a month.

I think a lot of people run into problems with EVDO because their expectations are too high. What I expect is: some sort of coverage 95% of the time. We can deal with modem speeds – that’s part of the price of getting out in the world. If I’m near a large city, I expect ’slow DSL’ speeds. If I get ‘cable modem’ speed somewhere, I will just be thankful. I also expect to have to invest in hardware. You can’t expect a tiny card sticking out of a laptop to compete with the 50+ pounds a satellite user carries around. You need the amplifier and antenna to improve performance – if you don’t understand that concept or just can’t live with modem speeds, you’ll probably never be happy with the service except in major cities.

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Now, common wisdom on solar panels is that they take 10-15 years to pay for themselves. I did some back of the envelope calculations based on our home bill and assumed no price increases. Fifteen years looks reasonable for our usage; probably a fair bit less once you factor inflation in.

On an RV, things are a bit different. Why? Because campgrounds average around $30 a night. Alternately we could run an annoyingly loud generator and pay high fuel prices. For simplicity’s sake, lets assume we could average $20 a night one way or the other. If we can avoid paying that $20, the system will easily pay for itself in under a year.

Currently I’m thinking about a 700W solar panel installation. I haven’t started shopping around for batteries and accessories just yet, but I have been able to find solar panels as low as $4.25 per watt. I believe that price may come down a bit more before we’re ready to start bolting on panels. This is the new price of course. There is an electronic salvage shop in town that may be able to bring that price down if we can find some relatively new 12 volt panels.

One of the challenges will be lowering our overall electrical usage. We’ll be generating roughly 10% of our current usage in an apartment on a good day!

• We’ll be cooling roughly 10% of the current volume.
• We’ll be using laptops instead of overpowered gaming rigs.
• We’ll move from 4 servers running at all times to a single file server running when we are actively using it.
• We’ll be actively trying to prepare food with a minimum of energy usage.
• We’ll only need to run the water heater 10-15 minutes a day.
• We’ll be traveling to avoid too much in the way of extreme heat or cold (except when it’s time to go skiing!).
• We may look into using a swamp cooler some out west. It’s not terribly practical where we are currently.
• We’ll be using a catalytic heater instead of electrical.
• Jenn already works for the light bulb police.

I’m sure we’ll come up with many more tricks along the way, but as a start I think we’ll be some of the most energy efficient folks in the country without losing too much in the way of comfort.

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In researching our communications options we decided that we wanted internet and voice communication that would work pretty much anywhere and of course we want it as cheaply as possible.

Cell coverage is pretty good with relatively high speed and low latency in the data packages. However, you have to be near a cell tower and preferably near one of the newer towers for high speed internet service.

Satellite internet works pretty much anywhere, but with significantly higher latency than cellular internet service. We can add in VOIP for a very low cost and piggy back our voice communications on top of our data communications much like a cellular network in reverse.

The variables we have to deal with are cost, coverage and quality of service. So far, I believe cellular data + voice is roughly twice the cost of satellite data + voice. On the east coast, cellular coverage is pretty good, but still spotty in a lot of remote locations. Out west it is considerably worse. Latency and setup time on a satellite connection are the two biggest flaws. You can’t really use satellite internet without spending 15-30 minutes setting up unless you drop 5k or so on a high end installation.

As our plan is to only drive 50-100 miles at a time and stay for a week or three at each location, the setup and lack of mobility isn’t too much of an issue. We’ve already sworn off internet gaming for the short term, so the biggest latency issue is likely to be with VOIP.

Last night, I decided to test out Skype. In order to simulate satellite latency, I routed a call via an overly complicated method. Caller was a laptop connected via ‘blackberry modem mode’. I’m not sure what data speed this really connects at, but the virtual serial port gets sets to 115.2kb, so that’s about 1/3 of satellite upstream capabilities. The party being called was using another VOIP phone on a separate network; as such, routing of the call was something like this:

Computer->USB->Cellular->Internet->PSTN->Internet->VOIP box.

Overall, call quality was very good. We experienced up to about 2 seconds latency at the peak and maybe .75 seconds average. Voice quality was excellent except for a few streaming/encoding glitches coming from the non-skype telephone. Our overall impression was that we could easily hold a conversation across a pretty low-bandwidth, high latency network.

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