On friday afternoon, I left the NZMCA park at Ardmore and headed to my son and daughter in laws driveway in Ardmore where I was later joined by Fiona after she had finished work.

My son Alex is a Systems Engineer and has been working on a solution for Wifi in our motorhome for some time. He was given an directional Antenna which has a range of up to 5k and for being top in his course, he was given a tiny Router which will work on 12v and also has enough grunt to drive the Antenna. … and he was happy to donate it to my Wifi cause.. thanks Alex 🙂

I didn’t realise how much setup was involved but after a lot of configuration changes, he managed to get it working in the van with huge throughput from an Access point in his shed, some distance away.

While there is some fine tuning to be done, the concept works. I think his plan is to change the Antenna to one that’s easier to setup and get working when its permanently mounted on the roof. While we’re testing it, we had the router on our bed with a network cable out of our window with the antenna bolted to the bike rack.

I have an account with Spark and have the free gig a day thing happening from the phone boxes but they’re always positioned where you can’t park an 8m motorhome anywhere near them, and the signal they send means you’ve virtually got to sit on top of them to be any use.

Ultimately, it’ll mean that our iphones, ipads, laptops etc will log in to the wee router permanently in the van and the router with the Antenna will drag in the signal from  wherever.

This system will hopefully mean that I can be a block or so away and still get a Spark signal or any other free wifi available 🙂

Exciting times.