It’s Dead, Jim . . . Again
I was up at about 8am this morning to see off our temporary next door neighbor’s Chris and Charles Yust on their trip back to San Angelo, TX
Just goes to show you how much I like them that I would get up that early.
But they didn’t even get out of the Voyager RV Resort without a problem. While they were hitching up their Trailblazer in the designated area on the road leaving the park, a Winnebago Tour came by with the door awning still out, scratching the side of their rig. Unfortunately they weren’t able to get a tag number.
Not a good start to their journey.
We had planned to go over to the Fairgrounds for the Pet Parade and Chili Cook-off starting at 11am, and the Closing Ceremonies at 3. But as the morning wore on, Jan developed an upset stomach so we passed it by. In fact we ended up not leaving the rig at all for the day.
Hopefully she’ll feel better tomorrow.
The last couple of parks we’ve stayed at I’ve noticed that my Cradlepoint CTR350 Wi-Fi router and Verizon aircard was taking longer and longer to connect. Then this morning sometime between 7:40 (the last email) and 8:15 (when I noticed the Internet was down) the Cradlepoint died. In fact it no longer even showed up on my list of available Wi-Fi signals.
I originally had a CTR500 that I bought in 2008 which lasted until July 2015 when it went ports up. In trying to replace it, I found that Cradlepoint was not longer in the aircard router business. So while I was looking around for a replacement, our friend Janna Clark came through with a CTR350 from her box of old, outdated electronics. And that 350 worked fine until this morning.
Looking things over, and after cycling the router power several times with no improvement, I then plugged the aircard directly into the computer, dialed in, and found I could get on the Internet with no problem, so it wasn’t the aircard.
Next up was to do a full reset on the router, taking it back to the factory settings. At this point I logged into the router directly and set it up once again. I was now happy to see the router showing up on my Wi-Fi list.
Thinking I had fixed the problem, I unplugged the aircard from the computer and plugged it into the the router. But rather than the problem now being fixed, the Wi-Fi signal disappeared from the list. And when I unplugged the aircard, the Wi-Fi signal came back. And the signal came and went every time I repeated the sequence.
Ok, that’s weird.
So my next thought was maybe it was actually a power supply problem, with the added load of the aircard lowering the voltage. But my VOM showed 5.13 volts unloaded and 5.03 volts under load.
So no problem there.
At this point, I figured “It’s Dead, Jim” and started to look for a replacement. Amazon had a new 350 was about $150, more than they cost originally. But a used, like new one, was available for $20, so I put my order in and had it sent to the Santa Fe RV Park in Apache Junction where we’ll be starting this Saturday.
Of course the aircard still works directly on the computer, we just don’t have Wi-Fi in the coach for our Kindles and Galaxy Tab. But we can hotspot my phone for these if need be.
With the rally over tomorrow will be a fix-it day with several projects on the menu.
Thought for the Day:
“There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.” ― Werner Heisenberg
adsfadsf
