A little bit of a catch up on what I have been up to during July. I have been doing something sort of radio related, well at least it uses my radio mast and antenna base, albeit more Internet data related.
When my family like to go camping, (or caravanning), one of our requirements is that I can access the Internet in order to support all my business interests. As many will know, some campsites are in idyllic areas, but, have sketchy 4G Internet access, some campsites do provide a shared WiFi access, which can be over subscribed and won’t support a stable remote desktop session over a VPN in order to work and support my IT businesses in real time.
Pro Route M2M Routers
The solution is to use a Pro Route M2M industrial router. These are like a home router on steroids, and way more rugged and programmable. I have owned this one for about 8 years, and is very reliable and works a treat. This type of router allows you to program it to ignore 3G connections, and with external antennas, the ability to connect to distant 4G networks further afield. High gain external antennas are necessary in order to maintain a stable connection to the distant mobile phone mast.
So, if I have owned this for 8 years, what is new you may ask. My solution, is to stick the Pro Route M2M unit on a pole inside a black box. Using one of my excellent drive on mast bases, and a sectional mast that slots together. At the mast head, there is a new “T” piece to support the two high gain 11dB 4G antennas from Unite Com. These need to be kept a meter apart because the M2M unit will use them both to see which is the better signal path, and additionally use the two antennas as a phase array to reconstruct a poor distant signal. The antennas are a high gain marine solution used for ship to shore inside territorial waters. Have you ever had a bad mobile phone telephone call and moved a few steps for the signal to clear up. Well the mast can’t move a few steps, and this is the reasoning behind the dual antennas.
Camp WiFi
This unit has WiFi, so simply needs to be fed with 12volts, and around our camp announces the WiFi network of “Colin”, the name of our caravan, and can be accessed with a usual WiFi password. This is the little down facing rubber duck antenna. However, we have found M2M units can run hot, really hot, and using a thermal imaging camera, I saw three hotspots, albeit two were milder, but, I added three stick on copper cooling fins, just to help with longevity of the unit.
LAN Connection
Even though the Pro Route router has WiFi, the eagle eyed will notice that I have an additional LAN port fed with a red LAN cable. This is so I can optionally plug a laptop in for programming, or if necessary turn my kids WiFi connection off if I need to take priority over the Internet connection.
VPN to Work
Even though this router has the capability of being able to VPN to another network, in case it ever was stolen, this is not used. Instead all of our laptops use SoftEther VPN to establish a secure and compressed connection “back to the office”.
Best Mobile Phone Network
I have tried a few of the mobile phone networks in the UK, and the one I find to work the best appears to be the O2 network, although this might be because of where I like to holiday. Interestingly using a GiffGaff SIM (which uses the O2 network) on the unlimited data tariff on a rolling monthly contract works the best for us as a family, as well as me for my work supporting commitments.
Overall
So, overall, a nice little constructing project this month in pulling all this together into a single package that can be packed away and used when camping. Should I need to use an amateur antenna, this “T” piece can be unbolted by releasing the two nuts at the centre of the “T” and the black box and “T” with both antennas comes away from the mast head as one complete piece. The antennas unscrew from the ends of the “T” for ease of transporting.
