jbh

  Waverly, FL

  Floral City, FL

  A few miles outside Mayo, FL

 A few miles south of Grenada, MS

  A few miles outside Demopolis, AL

  Several COE parks along Thurmond Lake, GA/SC

  Washington, TX

  To name a few. Note that data is derived from a BR-1 and two BoatANTs up on the roof rail, while voice is via the dinky little antenna and low-power transmitter in the phones. VoIP via wifi essentially connects the BR-1 and antennae to the phone allowing voice calls that don't otherwise work.

  If you're in a low-signal area, use your phones for VoIP (Viber etc) and use the Pepwave's wifi. It can mean the difference between whether you get to talk or not.

  I've spent years in places where the phone signal was unusable but VoIP worked fine.

  Docj, I've spent lots of time not moving in Florida, North Georgia and Texas near Houston; all were high humidity. Since I got this rig in 2013 I've been adding the maintenance dose of Biobor with each fill up and I haven't had any problem with algae. Beware that if there's a big kill of exising algae you could plug up fuel filters.

  I add Biobor to every tank. No problems sitting a while.

  Once I was in a park in central Texas and the revenooers, state I believe, drove through to check tags. Evidently if your RV is in Texas long enough you have to register it in Texas. Nothing ever came of it. 

  Yes, it's still a vehicle and registered as such even if immobilized and on a rental site.

Title is the same but one-time registration for the owned-land unit is RP (Real Property) and of course property tax applies. This also applies to co-op parks. I think that probably only applies to non-mobile units such as mobile homes and park models.

  First of all, it's an FM radio working on VHF freqs, and the transmitters may be surprisingly low-powered.

  So how do we deal with that. First, we get the antenna outdoors up on the roof or similar. Many WX radios have an antenna connection. If you have an ordinary FM dash radio with the antenna on the roof, get a splitter connector and a length  of cable and plug your WX radio into that. If not, perhaps you can connect an ordinary whip  FM antenna on a cable directly to the WX radio. No, the wavelength doesn't match but it's close enough.

  My MH body is aluminum. effectively a Faraday cage that blocks radio signals. I have to get the antenna in a window facing the transmitter to get anything. If this was critical I'd have a marine VHF (closer freq match) antenna up at the top of the rear ladder with the coax plugged into the WB.

  Of course you have to make sure you're tuned to appropriate channel and SAME code if you want to get alerts. Here's the list: https://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/coverage/county_coverage.html

  Once you enter the SAME code and channel, you should not only hear the broadcast but recieve the Weekly Test of the alert system.

  Of course you may simply be out of range. Locally my transmitters are TPA, MCO and MLB; TPA and MLB aren't heard at all and MCO is marginal.  I wouldn't count on getting an alert, but I probably would if I was 20 miles closer.

  What I do if significant weather is coming is monitor various internet sources, weather radio, and ordinary radio and tv stations as appropriate. Usually a radar feed is the earliest warning with tv stations being the slowest, but of course you have to be looking at the radar feed to be warned.

  Lately I've been doing the CG wifi thing since my 8800 gives a poor data rate at my location for whatever reason. Anyway, I checked it this morning with Speedtest and got about 100kbps download and 2.5mbps upload. If the problem was entirely low snr would this be possible?

  BTW, I've never had it shut off unexpectedly.

  I haven't measured it here, however I've been able to successfully record streaming HD TV all nights this past week between 01:00 and 05:00. Not remotely possible in daytime.

Although low SNR would usually indicate to me the problem, while at Bushnell I could count on 20+ Mbps overnights with the same low SNR. Odd. The nearest Verizon tower is about five miles away, across a big lake and orange groves.

Yes I agree that the problem is tower/network load; US-27 is a major highway through this area plus there's continuing new growth.

 Big change...

  I moved from Floral City to near Waverly, Fla. and download bandwidth is crap. Currently I have -96dB RSRP and 1dB SNR, a better signal than I had at Floral City, but average download bandwidth is 200kbps to 400kbps. Upload is 4Mbps or better. Obviously streaming isn't happening. Since prepaid non-contract accounts are stated to be lower priority I must be at the bottom of the totem pole and all Verizon traffic along the US-27 corridor in central Florida is above me.

  Since I intend to homebase here for a year or more I just signed up for Spectrum hardwired broadband stated to be 100Mbps with no data cap or throttling for $44.99/mo. For any significant travels I'll restart Verizon.

 We've been hitting the 8800L jetpack hard, streaming to the Playon desktop media server (playon.tv). Verizon throughput  dies around 4 pm and comes back up at around 9pm everyday; that correlates to everyone getting home and turning on their devices. In my area there's one tower and lots of new population. The thing's working fine.

I use a low-power12v-5v plug and leave it on; nothing gets hot.

My prepaid plan also specifically says "up to 780p".

Visually it's not 1080p.

  I connected the other BoatANT and got a surprise.

  With one antenna the fastest I could consistently get was 4 Mbps; now it's 20 Mbps!

  Unfortunately tower overload kills the speed from late afternoon through the evening; everyone gets home and cranks up their devices.

Sign in and look under About for your session . Looks like it's showing overall under Data Usage. 

The 8800L comes with a USB cable, I just plugged it into an ordinary 12v-5v USB adaptor rather than the AC wallwart.

  BTW, it's the same temperature to my hand  when it's not plugged in  as when it's plugged in to low power. The only time it got warmer was when the cat sat on it.

  I found a USB timer on Amazon; it can be set to turn on after X hours and stay on for Y hours.

  This is the newest 8800L. It's plugged into a low-power 12v-5v USB source, which it did correctly identify, rather than the high-power wallwart that comes with it. I felt the thing and it's hardly even warm, certainly not overheating the battery, so I suspect it's ok. I need to run it on the 12v source.

  Will it harm the jetpack battery to always have it plugged in? Or is it "smart?"

  The jetpack showed up this afternoon and in a short time I was again online with Verizon.

  With the thing sitting right here on the desk it reported -112dB. Fairly usable but pretty slow, definitely slower than the Pepwave BR-1 w/BoatANT. I anticipated this so got an antenna-connector adapter and connected it to the BoatANT. Signal strength popped up to -103dB and it got way faster. Multiple Speedtest runs varied between 1Mbps to 4Mbps. It's definitely faster than the Pepwave in this location.

  When the other antenna adaptor shows up I'll plug in the other BoatANT. I expect that to help at least a little.

  Two BoatANTs? They cover 700mHz to 2.5gHz; one was used for cell and the other for wifi. Wifi performance was phenomenal for an omni antenna but it's not needed for that anymore.

  BTW, the phones don't work here at all for voice or data.

  The problem could be that they couldn't activate my three-year-old Pepwave on the account, and I have to get a new device. It's not a Verizon jetpack.

  A Verizon CSR told me yesterday that smartphones and a jetpack can't be on the same prepaid plan/account, so I'll have two accounts. No matter as long as it's working.

  The latest as of yesterday is that the jetpack didn't show up so I called; the gist of it is that while they'd managed to charge me for the data account apparently each of the three CSRs involved thought the other had completed the transaction. The next CSR learned that the postpaid account had been terminated, there was a free-floating payment in my name and there was no new prepaid data account. He had to go confirm with his supervisor and perhaps fixed things up. At least he gave me various confirmation numbers etc and the jetpack is supposed to show up Monday or Tuesday. He was thrilled to learn of the new unlimited account he could sell. ;-)

  BTW, I'm on CG wifi fed by a Viasat account. While it would be ok for an individual, I can tell when my neighbors are at home or away and on weekends it's pretty much unusable.

  Thanks very much guys. I'm on the fringe of a fringe area (Wahoo Swamp) and the Pepwave with a BoatANT was just barely making it; I'm thinking I'll probably have to connect my antenae to the much-anticipated jetpack to make it talk. Unfortunately FedEx passed me by today.

  I'll report back.