Table of Contents
Radio and Internet
iOverlander
While traveling on the road full time or even part time, one of the most important thing to find is a place to stay overnight or even a few days. One of the most important sites we have found for this is recently is iOverlander.
The App has a nice map that uses your phone's GPS to help display places next to you. People make entries and rate locations. They may or may not give you a lot of information. It also lists other resources that might be needed like dumps and water. Although for Dumps, I find something like Sanidumps to be better for the listings. Still it is nice to have stuff in only one App.
The only thing I do have to say is that to certain degree I have found most iOverlander reviewers are not in 5th Wheel or Travel Trailer RVs. Seems like most are of the Car or Van variety. I say this because of the locations given look like they are only meant for a car or a van. We had a hell of a time getting back up a road because it lead to point that we couldn't turn around, which meant we had to back up the road, which was not easy at all. I am thankful to the reviewers that tell you if their RV fit or not at a location.
T-Moblie and LG IMS Service Failing
It seems like T-Mobile dropped the ball with LG Phones recently. Both of our LG Phone on T-Mobile got the error that the LG IMS service kept failing. At first I thought it was just something bad with my phone and I did a factory reset which did nothing. Later I learned that my wife's phone was also having the same issue. So I looked up the error and T-mobile and several pages popped up to explain that this issue just happened.
Seems that T-mobile was pushing out an update across their network that affected LG phones. Of course it does not help that LG has gotten out of of the cell phone market. I am going to guess that is why T-Mobile did not notice that the change was going to affect people with LG phones.
At any rate a fix is forth coming and there is a fix that you can do to stop the error from popping up although that fix is not an official fix. Still it did solve the issue on both our phones.
CB and Other Radios
Not that I plan on getting one, but it was interesting to see that at the Flying J the other day, I saw a bunch of stuff for CBs. Things like power cables, microphones, antennas, and antenna mounts.
I guess I am surprised that some truckers still use them or have them. The only thing I can assume is that since it still requires no license some of them still find it useful.
I have had a CB before but never really used it. I have also had my Amateur Radio (HAM) rigs in my car/truck before. That was not something I think the wife wanted in current truck. So I paired down to some handhelds for this adventure. I would have liked to at least have a GMRS mobile rig but it was the same as the HAM radio too many wires for the wife, so handhelds again. Although to be honest, none of the GMRS mobiles look that great to me. Most are basically just the handhelds with an external antenna. Most do not even allow you to hit GMRS repeaters. You are almost better getting an illegal radio modification to do GMRS on a radio with another service as well. Not that I recommend that, I am just saying that I can understand why people do it.
Starlink Goes Mobile?
I just saw an article this morning that Starlink is going to allow for mobile operations. The cost will be an additional $25 per month. This on top of the $110 fee per month and the $599 in equipment.
The big issue is Starlink all that it is cracked up to be? There are already reports that it is not. One big thing for sure is the power usage. The new units have a lower power usage about 60-70 Watts but that is still a lot for someone in an RV full time, who is boondocking it. A rough calculation would put that at 5 amps per hour. Which for 24hr service would be around 120 ampH. That's my whole battery system. Even if I just did 12 hours a day , it would still be 60 ampH and that's a pretty impressive drain. I certainly would need a 4th battery in my current battery bank. Because of the way we use Internet, during the day work and at night streaming, it is more likely that we would be running it at least 18 hours and in some cases 20 hours.
One other things is that you still need a pretty good view of the sky. So depending on where we are at, we may or may not get the Internet still.
I am also not sure if I want to pay $135 per month in fees combined with the power usage. This is going to be one of those things I will have to talk over with the wife.