Boost WiFi with antenna while camping?

[grsweeten]

My wife, kids, and I, along with friends and in-laws enjoy camping. We go quite often to different campgrounds that have wifi and often they have very little wifi signal and very slow speed. With our kids trying to plan on the ipad, or watch movies, it makes it frustrating. I want to purchase a telescopic flag pole and mount a omnidirectional wifi antenna and hook it up to an old router to boost our signal. I read an article about turning the router into a repeater and I'm fine with that. However, how can I hook up the antenna to the router/repeater? The router is an old linksys with only ethernet jacks, can I use some type of adapter to convert from the antenna cord to ethernet? Thank you in advance for suggestions on my plan.

 

[RealBeast]

What you want to do is really not feasible. I would explore alternative sources of wireless connections.

With a poor signal and minimal local bandwidth you will need a different solution. For example, a repeater won't do you any good if the signal is weak, repeaters need to be located where the signal is still strong. Repeaters also cut your bandwidth in half. I generally do not find them very useful in any context.

With a poor quality, low bandwidth network at most of the facilities, I would look into whether there are any 3G providers with good coverage where you are camping. If so, use a cell phone in hotspot mode for your local devices (such connections are fairly pricey for data so you will want to optimize its use). As far as watching movies, it will be a lot cheaper if you can plan ahead and take a large batch with you on a portable HDD than waste bandwidth downloading them at campsites.

I suspect that a big reason that the campsites have poor wireless is that they have a low end connection and lots of users that want a big data pipe for the kids who expect it because they have it at home.

The other solution, depending heavily on terrain and your budget, is mobile satellite Internet access with an antenna mounted on your camping vehicle.

 

[grsweeten]

Will this improve our signal at least? We don't need to stream, but having a somewhat usable wifi signal is still worth the investment in my book. I'd rather not spend $50 per month, $600 per year for my kids to fly through it streaming a couple movies. I had a mifi card for work that could barely connect at times, so I'm a little skeptical of it.

 

[RealBeast]

No, unfortunately if you have a poor signal you cannot really improve it at the point where it is already degraded. In other words a big antenna does not do enough to compensate for a poor signal with computer wireless connections.

Many wireless solutions that might help, like wireless bridges or directional APs, require access to and changing router settings (or even modifying the signal sending equipment like adding an outdoor directional AP) that won't happen at the campsites.

There is no good solution for movies other than taking them with you on a storage device. They require too much bandwidth in a location where there just isn't much.

Camping is in essence going to the worst possible location for Internet access -- away from populated areas with fast connections, so the possible solutions that are fast, like mobile satellite are unfortunately quite expensive and make $50 a month look like a drop in the bucket.

 

[casper1973]

If your devices are getting poor signal strength (1-2 bars) and keep dropping off or disconnecting then it's definitely worth considering an externally mounted antenna with an access point to re-distribute the signal for your devices.


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If you get decent signal strength (3+ bars consistently) but it's still very slow to browse/download/stream etc an antenna may not benefit you a huge amount. The parks likely just have slow internet, or limit your speeds (this is very commonly done).

In this case you might have to look into an external solution such as 3G/4G/LTE. If you do go this route I suggest getting a 4G/LTE router with external antenna connections so you can replace the antenna with something more powerful and mount it on a pole/roof.

I have setup this device in the past http://www.solwise.co.uk/3g-routers-4g-lte-s4.htm along with this antenna mounted on the roof http://www.solwise.co.uk/4g-antenna-omni-ren66008x-odn.html and an extension cable connecting the two.

Of course you are still at the mercy of a phone provider offering 3G/4G in that area and even then it may still struggle for signal due to surrounding terrain, interference etc. It's never going to be a 100% reliable solution, but your options are quite limited I'm afraid.