Wi-Fi is a branding of the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standards. Wi-Fi is a means of data-networking devices via radio. Most laptops made in recent years include some flavor of Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi is sometimes available in RV parks. When Wi-Fi is purported to be available, it can be difficult to use. Our "Wi-Fi WAN Connection" is my attempt to improve the usability of RV park Wi-Fi from within our fifth wheel.
The Wi-Fi WAN connection consists of:
Since Kay and I picked up our RV and started fulltiming in March 2004, the situation with Wi-Fi in RV parks has improved somewhat, but is still disappointing. Many parks advertise that they have Wi-Fi at RV sites; few really deliver. The hardware is there. It is hooked up. It is turned on. But it does not work. There are always a million reasons and excuses for it not working. And of course, if they charged for the Wi-Fi and it does not work, there is almost never a refund. Buyer beware.
One tactic I found that works is to call ahead to a park and ask how well the Wi-Fi actually works. If you are talking to the park owner/manager, then of course it is working just fine. But if you can get a work camper, you can often get the truth, especially if the work camper has gotten burned themselves.
Assuming that the park has Wi-Fi and it can actually connect to the Internet, the largest remaining problem is getting a usable signal within the RV. Before we got the external Wi-Fi antenna we often had to sit in odd places in the RV, and in odd positions, to get a usable signal (or we had to go outside).
The external Wi-Fi antenna permits us to use a park's Wi-Fi from the comfort of our desks. It can also give us a better connection at our desks than we could get if we were sitting on top of the RV with our laptops.
Our method of connecting to Wi-Fi means that no matter how many computers we use, we only have to deal with one connection to the RV park's Wi-Fi. I set up the connection. Kay and anyone else in the trailer just uses the Internet.
This can save money in some cases. There are RV parks that charge per connection. Even when we had three people using the Internet, we still only had one connection and paid only one fee. In cases where the for-$ Wi-Fi was managed by the park (versus some big provider) I asked about connecting in this way. I was generally told not to worry about it; if they did not like it, I used the satellite connection instead.
In over three and a half years of full time RV'ing we never encountered any Wi-Fi installation that could be considered secure. In all cases everyones' Wi-Fi connections could be captured and read by a kid with a laptop. I try to use secure email, but some RV park setups block secure email!
There were a couple of parks that used password protection. But everyone got the same password. Plus, they both used the lowest-level, most easily broken, form of security. No challenge to a kid with a laptop.
I use Wi-Fi because of its speed. But the satellite conection is much safer. When we had a multi-WAN router on our LAN, I set it up to do email over the slower but secure satellite connection, and did our web browsing over Wi-Fi.
I have several email accounts of different varieties with different ISP's. They ALL work just fine with standard ports in most parks, but not in others. The Wi-Fi setup in some RV parks block standard ports!
If you have problems sending email in a particular park, you might want to try alternate port numbers for SMTP, as shown on this web page: Well Known IP Ports, 0 Through 999 (search for SMTP).
The same is true for receiving email. If you have an email account that normally works, but does not once you get on Wi-Fi at a park, try alternate ports for the type of email account you have (e.g., IMAP, POP). See the web page referenced above.
The heart of the Wi-Fi WAN connection is the Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge. The bridge is a special purpose "computer" about the size of a paperback novel. It connects to the RV park's Wi-Fi and forwards the connection via its Ethernet port.
I have the bridge mounted in the bedroom TV cubbyhole to put it close to the external antenna. There is a LAN drop in the TV cubby that feeds the Wi-Fi connection back to the patch panel in the equipment cabinet at the rear of the office area. When we are using a park's Wi-Fi, I connect the bridge to the WAN port of the router; this gives Internet access to all devices connected to the LAN.
The bridge is connected to the external antenna by a rather expensive piece of antenna cable and even more expensive connectors.
It is important to have the bridge configured to forward the hardware MAC address of the router, and to use the same host name as the router. Some park Wi-Fi systems "see" both the bridge and the router and get confused. By passing the same hardware address and name, the park Wi-Fi system thinks it is seeing only one device, and is happy.
The HyperLink HG2409U 20" 8.5 dBi Omni WLAN Antenna is what permits us to to pick up even fairly weak Wi-Fi signals. It is mounted on the roof of the fifth wheel at the front. This front position seems to give the best line of sight to the Wi-Fi antenna in the most parks, which gives the best signal strength.
I also added a 12" extender to raise the antenna a foot higher. This put the bottom of the antenna above the top of the air conditioner and other equipment on the roof in that area.
We have been in parks that did not have Wi-Fi, but where surrounding businesses did. In one park we connected to a for-$ Wi-Fi service in a neighboring park. This service was not visible to our laptops even when we were outside, but worked just fine on our LAN inside the trailer via the bridge. We were also able to "see" a Wi-Fi service at a nearby Flying J.
The external antenna is rigid, which means we cannot leave it raised when we tow.
The Diamond Antenna K9000TM Motorized Mount solved the problem. I clamped it to the solar panel support brackets on the roof, and ran the power and antenna lines through the roof to the TV cabinet in the bedroom where the bridge is mounted. The TV cubby has a 12VDC "cigarette lighter" style outlet; the antenna motor runs on 12VDC.
The control switch for the antenna mount is to the left of the TV (or where the TV was when we lived in the trailer). When we pulled into a park that claimed to have Wi-Fi, I hit the button to raise the external Wi-Fi antenna. When we got ready to leave, I hit a button to lower the antenna.
One complication in mounting the antenna was a mismatch between the marine threads on the antenna and the CB-antenna threading on the mount. It took a little doing, but I found the proper adaptors. These days HyperLink (and other folks) have external Wi-Fi antennas with standard CB-antenna mounts.