SaskTel

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A Redneck Kind of Day

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.

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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.

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First step, join the two brooms together.

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

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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.

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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*

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Saturday Morning Sundries

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!

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

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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:

signal strength

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.

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What’s Next, Brimstone?

YAY! The rain stopped!

BOO! The rain stopped because heavy winds chased away the clouds!

What a strange weather week…

At least there’s sun now and I’m actually getting some amps in!

And in other happy news, my internet connection has been GREAT all morning. I only have one bar, but I haven’t had any drops at all and I was even able to stream Netflix without it occasionally pausing for ages to load the next bit. Maybe the high gain antenna isn’t a total dud. Then again, I got good service like this occasionally with the stubby antenna, so it’ll take weeks of good service like this for me to believe it’s the norm rather than the exception.

Speaking of antennas, just before bed last night I heard the pot on which the antenna is resting slide across the roof. I ignored it until morning. I woke up around 7:00 to torrential downpour and decided to go see if the antenna was okay then go back to bed to warm myself up.

I went outside, and found the antenna on the ground. The magnet on that thing is really strong, so I that was rather surprising. I climbed up to the roof, holding on tightly since the ladder was slick, and found the pot right at the edge of the roof and turned over. I got the antenna resituated and wedged the pot into the space at the top of the ladder where it can only slide in one direction.

I was sopping wet by this point, even though I’d only been out for a few minutes, so I was glad to get back into my flannel jammies and under the covers! Some mornings just aren’t meant for getting out of bed…

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Wilson High Gain Antenna is a Dud

The coupler for my Sleek and high gain antenna arrived today. No exclamation point because there isn’t an iota of difference between the stubby antenna and the high gain one.

I’m trying to decide if I am going to live with this pretty much useless internet connection all summer or if I will try to get a partial refund and buy a different solution.

It is cloudy again today and very humid, which has definitely affected my signal since I got the Sleek, so I may give the bigger antenna a couple of days before I decide to return it or not.

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Wilson Electronics Over Promises and Under Delivers

Call me whatever you like, I will always get angry at businesses that don’t care about their customers. I work really hard for the little money I have and spend it carefully it makes me mad when a company takes that for granted.

I purchased a Wilson Sleek cell booster and high gain antenna after doing a lot of research and getting opinions from people. Nowhere was there any mention that you need an adapter to couple these two devices. The antenna even says “Works on all cellular devices” with no mention of the adapter.

The only way to know that you need an adapter is to understand that FME female and SMA female connectors are incompatible. It’s not my job to know that or even to research it. The products are Wilson’s and it’s their job to make purchase easy for their customers by providing compatible products or at least making a note that X is not compatible with Y without Z. I have found several reviews of the Sleek and the coupler chastising Wilson for this same issue.

I have now been waiting 11 days for my damn coupler to come and it likely won’t be here for another week.

I don’t want to count how much money I have lost in that time because I am barely able to get online. I spent $190 on this device, which seriously ate into my gas budget, so going up the hill three or four times a day is no longer an option.

Yes, I can get online a little at home, after pages hang and hang and hang and connections time out. What is infuriating me (and I don’t use the word lightly) is that I get 1 bar at the top of the hill with the Mifi only and can download a 330MB file in five minutes flat. Down here, with the Sleek giving me 2 to 3 bars, it would take three hours to download that same file, if the connection didn’t keep timing out. I’d give photographic evidence of this, but I can’t upload pictures tonight. In fact, I never know what I will and won’t be able to do at any given time.

Just a half hour ago, Netflix was streaming nicely and pages were loading and now I know that if I don’t manually save this post to a text file, I will lose it because the connection will time out as I press save. I know this for a fact because this is what happened last night when I wrote the bulk of this post and then set it aside until I’d had some time to cool off. You don’t want to read what I had to say last night.

In other words, don’t buy all the testimonials that rave about how many extra bars the Sleek will give you. Bars means squat! I would have been so much better off putting that $190 into Miranda’s gas tank and making an arrangement with a farmer up the hill to park in his field for a month.

Now, I’m hopeful that the Sleek will work better with the high gain antenna, but what if it doesn’t? I’ll have lost almost a month and wasted $190 because Wilson Electronics is too lazy to put on their literature that you need a $6 coupler to marry their products.

But what angers me the most is that I wrote a polite email to Wilson last week about this issue and got an autoresponder telling me a human would answer me in two business days. More than two business days later, nothing. Not even a canned insincere ‘sorry, we’ll try to do better.’ Having no serious competition is no excuse to treat your customers like they don’t count.

Wilson Electronics, you suck.