The day’s weather kept improving as the morning marched on, so I headed over to C&C’s around noon to get as much water as I could lug in my buggy so that I could do a couple of loads of laundry. I can’t wait to have a proper clotheslines, never mind running water, but this worked just fine.

Yes, I could take my laundry over to Laura’s anytime, but I really prefer to do laundry this way. It’s like when someone says they prefer to hand wash dishes rather than use a dishwasher.

Then, it was time to scavenge next door to find something with which to elevate my high gain antenna. Am I glad I didn’t glue anything to the roof of my RV. I wish I had bought the antenna model that doesn’t need a ground plane.

Anyway, several failed experiments later, I came up with the best solution based on what I what I found. I used two brooms, the lid from my soup pot, and lots of duct tape.

First step, join the two brooms together.

Next step, remove the handle from the pot lid exposing the screw.

Then, make a hole in the top of the broom and screw the lid into it (I know, I’m a genius).

After, scramble up the ladder and attach the antenna to the pot lid and then the brooms to the ladder, all with one hand while the other holds the ladder. This exercise needs to be repeated a few times since the lid is not exactly flat, so the magnet doesn’t stick as well as it could.

Final step, advise your blog readers that those electrical wires are nowhere near your crazy contraption and even if said crazy contraption were to blow over, there is zero risk of it catching in the wires.

Unfortunately, this exercise was for naught as my signal strength hasn’t changed (currently -111). I am going to try to find a perfectly flat and larger ‘ground plane’ and see if that helps. The trick is to find something light enough to not make the whole thing too top heavy (why my earlier prototypes failed).

This is as high as I can get the antenna with the amount of cable I have. I imagine that the signal degradation I’d get from extending the cable length to get the antenna higher would negate the value of the extended height.

I think the biggest frustration with my internet connection is that the numbers really mean squat. Sometimes, I can stream and do whatever at -111 and other times like right now, I have to wait 20 minutes for the internet to decide to start working at again at -103 and I’m glad I’m learning to copy and paste my posts to a text editor as I write them.

Bah, the internet’s not coming back. I have climbed back up on the roof, taken the antenna down, and put it back on the soup pot closer to the roof. Back to the drawing board I go. Not that bring the antenna back down helped at all. Nope, this internet connection is definitely sentient (as all internet connections are, btw, as per more than a decade’s worth of experience with crappy connections).

Some time later…

Now, I’ve got the pot duct-taped to the lid to provide a better ground plane and the pot is resting on the top of the ladder by way of its handles. I am averaging about -100 this way and have seen as high as -90, but no lower than -104 (currently -96). But before anybody (ie. me) gets excited, clouds rolled in and then rolled out. Clouds are determining the quality of my internet connection. *sighs*

My Social Life

Yesterday evening, I headed over to Laura’s for Friday night canasta, not sure that it would happen since Charles and Caroline have a house full of guests. Well, the guests (two of Caroline’s sisters) came to learn how to play (so I was no longer the newbie) and another frequent attendee also materialized, as well as Charles. So we were seven around the table and we played in pairs. Caroline brought wine, Laura pulled out some sweets, and we played to just past midnight. It was a lot of fun!

The Weather

It was June first when I walked home last night. The walk was about a block. I was frozen solid when I came in and went to bed wearing flannel jammies, a sweatshirt, and heavy socks and I still woke up in the middle of the night to add another blanket.

Twenty Cents Well Spent

I hate when I think I need something, buy it, and realise that the need arose from a one-time occasion. That doesn’t happen much anymore, but when you have a kitchen full of cooking implements, it’s easy to think you can get by without certain things. Well, I have used my slotted spoon and splash guard several times since I bought them last week, so they were worth taking home!

The splash guard is the exact size I need to cover my cast iron pan!

Internet

It is very mercurial. I got up this morning and it was fine, not blazing fast but steady, and then it just… stopped. But I couldn’t even connect to the Mifi, so I figured I was having Mifi problems and rebooted it. But that didn’t help the connection. It came back when it wanted to. And it dropped out in the middle of this part of the post. No rhyme or reason at all.

Readers Mark and Jack sent me some helpful information over night about cable length and signal strength respectively. Jack said to go through all my menus and sub-menus until I found a numerical value for signal strength. I Googled something along the lines of “how to find signal strength MiFi 5792” and found instructions for an older model of Verizon Jetpack that gave me enough breadcrumbs to find the answer. It’s About –> Diagnostics and then you have to look for RSSI:

The RSSI this morning has varied between -108 and the current -103 since I added an extra foot of height below the antenna. But even those that -103 is technically better than -108, I’m still experiencing the same unstable internet connection. I still have a couple of feet of cable, so I am going to try to get the antenna even higher and see if that helps.