Post 88: The Tricks of Staying Connected

The Tricks of Staying Connected

Feb 15th, 2018

Now with reading this you may think Joy is crazy lol, but we have found some of these things actually helped us! The Tricks of Staying Connected did NOT included; standing on one foot, with your head tilted to the left, your eyes blinking, and your tongue sticking out at an odd angle. ALL while holding the internet device you are using high up in the air in one hand. lol No, we found a few, well a little unusual tricks. Some we figured out ourselves and some we heard form other full time RVers.

In the beginning..

We parked on BLM land, in the middle of no where and honestly expected to have INTERNET!! What were we thinking?? Then we take our sad little phone with its pitiful INTERNET package and see 1 tiny little bar on it.

Walking around the trailer inside and out, trying to get more bars. THAT’s when we realize that if we raise it up high and faced a certain way, we can SOMETIMES catch a cell tower. WOOT. OK, now that’s new. So back inside, we carefully place the phone on a window ledge and back off slowly. Great! now we can do something. lol

Using towers in the area

We then discovered if you are in a populated area, with other campers and your  internet drops we were told about a “Fix It” trick.

1. Reboot your server (in our case our phone)
2. Reboot your laptop (Joy figured this one out)
3. You should be up and ready to go again. These two small reboots often catch the wave of a less busy tower and get you up and running again.
4. We also discovered, if you have been doing a lot of work on your pc for a few hours, it doesn’t hurt to reboot your server (phone) and your laptop. This seems to help speed things up as well.

Another trick we found but not always possible

When you are researching out areas that you want to Boondock,  check the reviews on internet to see if your cell phone or internet is mentioned. Another thought is,we went to a new place for us and drove around with our phone up in the air watching the bars  a few times. lol We found that, one side of a road had NO INTERNET for us at all, but the other side of the road had 4G. We were astounded. Needless to say, we camped on the area with 4G internet.

Using an External Antenna

When we first started RVing we were so frustrated with not getting any internet with our “supposedly” great package, we looked into an external antenna. We discovered the Drive Sleek Vehicle Signal Booster Kit from weboost. We wanted  the booster for the truck and trailer, we figured out the Drive Slick Vehicle was more portable than the weboost RV kit (plus it was a lot more money lol).

Now we are not saying this is the BEST thing out there. We found it works well in SOME areas and not at all in others. On the road it works well on the main highways and in big cities. We haven’t had a chance to test it yet in a desolate area. We are currently in a desert, 20 minutes from the nearest town and oddly enough, WE HAVE 4G. Just can’t explain that one haha.

Our last discovery which was actually our first!

Our last suggestion, we discovered 6 months ago and we found to be quite funny. We were camping for the summer in one location in Canada. We were having a heck of a time with our internet which was GREAT when we first parked. For about a month we had amazing internet. Then it went down hill quickly.

The internet we had was a portable Jet Pak. So we were able to take it in the truck with us and into the trailer. When it went down hill, we started paying attention when we had it in the car and doing speed tests where ever we went. Trying to figure out if it was the unit we had or the location we were in.

Oddly enough it was one of those tilt your head to the left and stick your tongue out kind of answers. We discovered if we parked our truck in the RIGHT LOCATION at our campsite, and we mean EXACT LOCATION! We had tolerable internet service.

If we were a foot off, our internet was horrible. So, we left the JetPak in the Truck at night, parked the truck where it needed to be parked and enjoyed surfing the net.

Sharing

Now that we have shared what we can remember of our little tricks to stay connected, if you have any that you know of, please feel free to let us know by commenting below. We would be glad to hear from you and happy to add it to our list.

Hope this is helpful to someone, we know we appreciated what people shared with us :).