We were up early Saturday morning to attend the standing breakfast gathering of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club at the Senate Coney Island in South Lyon. I was discussing our cell phone signal situation with Scott, AC8IL, and he suggested I try a passive booster system before putting money into an active repeater. The idea behind the passive booster system is to connect two antennas (of the same characteristic impedance) together with a co-axial cable (of the same characteristic impedance). One antenna goes outside and the other goes inside. The inside antenna will generally be omnidirectional, since you could be anywhere in the house/building with your phone, but the outside antenna will likely be directional since it can be pointed at the most favorable cell tower. Highly directional antennas have “gain” compared to omnidirectional antennas, which is to say, they provide a strong signal at their co-ax connector than an omnidirectional antenna placed in the same location. This signal will be transmitted down the matched co-ax cable to the other antenna where it will tend to radiate back into space. It works in the other direction as well. The nice thing about this potential solution is that if I purchase antennas and coax cables that will also work with an active booster (repeater) then I only have to buy the active booster if the antennas alone are not adequate.
When we got home we continued working on preparations for our trip and the open house by hanging the last piece of wall art, at least for now. When going to rallies Linda often prepares dinner meals ahead of time and freezes them. This simplifies our evening meals and leaves open the possibility of going out to dinner, which RVers do a lot (at least at rallies). Between food, clothes, toiletries, and miscellaneous other things there was a lot of “stuff” to put on board even for a short outing. I helped pull stuff together and get it on board while attending to the updating of our Rand McNally RVND7710 GPS unit. The map update said it would take 14+ hours to download. It ran for about 8 hours and was indicating that it had 1 hour and 29 minutes left to go when it hung up and quit downloading. 🙁
Our AT&T High Speed Internet / Digital Subscriber Line (HSI/DSL) service is a bad joke when it comes to speed and may be at the point where I need to file a service request/complaint. It’s only real benefit is the 150 Gb monthly data allowance. But the service seems to be so slow that I’m not sure I could transfer 150 Gb of data in a month if uploaded and downloaded 24/7.
[A note about RV “stuff”: The truth is that full-time RVers also have “stuff”, but it is limited by their available space and does get loaded and unloaded before and after each “trip”. (Full-timers don’t go on trips; they just move they home around the country.) They also have “spring cleaning”, although it can occur at any time of the year. For many this is an annual ritual of completely emptying the RV, examining all of the “stuff”, deciding what not to put back, and re-configuring the storage of the rest.]