Daily Archives: September 20, 2016
Going Back to Kansas City . . .
Well, Amber, our PO mail carrier showed up right on time today, with our Amazon order, but tomorrow may be the real test.
Last night I ordered this Yagi directional Wi-Fi antenna to try and resolve my Internet problems.
If I can get a consistently good signal from the Company Man’s system, then I’ll be OK. The problem right now is that sometimes I’ve got 1 – 2 bars, and sometimes I’ve got 4 bars, and the desktop in the rig can’t even see the signal. So this antenna, along with a 10 ft. cable will hopefully do the trick.
Anyway, because I ordered the antenna Next Day, it’s coming by FedEx, not the PO, so we’ll see what happens. Tony, the landowner here, says UPS and FedEx have both delivered to his house at this address, and his house is about a mile down the road past us. So hopefully it will work out. But you never know.
On the same subject, I’m beginning to think that the 3G problem here is not with my Wilson system but with the Verizon 3G signal. And if that’s true, it explains a lot about all the squirrely problems I’ve had.
I have always used the Open Signal App on my phone to point me in right direction of the closest Verizon cell tower. And that’s how I knew in 2012, the last time we used the Wilson system, that we were hitting a tower over on I-37, 19.5 miles away. Open Signal even showed me the Lat/Long coordinates of the tower itself.
But things got strange when I did the same thing this year. First off, although OS showed me the direction of the nearest Verizon tower, it also said there were NO towers nearby. And although it gave me Lat/Long coordinates, it did not give me a distance.
Hmm!
But where it really gets strange is where OS thinks the cell tower actually is. Since it wasn’t telling me the distance to the tower, I thought I’d just type the coordinates into Google Maps and see where it was really located.
And suddenly the weak signal made sense, because according to OS, we hitting a cell tower about 80 miles SW of Kansas City, MO. Now that’s a long distance phone call. Something is screwy somewhere.
OS also gives me both the actual and the relative signal strength, which in this case was –111 dbm and 56%, not a good signal at all. I had been messing with the Wilson system, but at this point it was turned off, and I’m just staring at the OS display while I’m running through ideas about what the problem was, and what else could I check.
Suddenly the signal strength readings jumped to – 93 dbm and 100%, a good signal.
WTH?
Looking up at the top of my phone display, I noticed that it had dropped back to 3G mode instead of the normal 4G. And it stayed like that for a couple of minutes, when it then jumped back to 4G and –111 dbm.
WTH?
And as of right now, a little after midnight, I have no 3G or 4G,data at all, even on my Galaxy S5 phone. And when I try to Hotspot it, I get either ‘Fatal Error: No Connection’ or “No Data Connection’. And it’s been that way for a couple of hours. But the phone call part still works just fine. So this may all be Verizon’s fault.
But as they always say when you call them, they’re working on it.
I still haven’t heard back from Colaw RV Salvage since my phone call last week about a replacement screen door latch, so I’ll try to give them a call again tomorrow.
Thought for the Day:
“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making mistakes.” ~ Meister Eckhart
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