Collecting ideas for making a wireless RV router

Technical Support for Routers
41

Yeah, but it’s designed to plug into cigar lighter sockets, which are terribly unreliable. An RV is a hostile environment, with vibration the main enemy. Everything has to be well secured and a cigar lighter socket doesn’t make the cut.

There is no way you would use one of those chargers in a mobile environment without modifying it to hardwire the input, and then you’re back to hacking something designed for a totally different purpose because the ideal solution isn’t available.

If the point of this thread is to figure out what features are required in a router to make it an ideal choice for mobile applications - then USB power input only is acceptable in that environment, but not ideal.

42

We will have an outdoor antenna ready for RV Internet shortly. It will be sold separately and we would like to hear from your opinions about its installation on RV. More specs will come when it’s ready.

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43

My comments:

  1. Low profile - good.
  2. Mounting requires drilling a hole - not good.

I like to keep holes in the roof to a minimum and instead have a single duct to the roof with weatherproof box above and cable glands from which cables run in flat duct to wherever needed. So a side entry for the cable would be preferred.

Is this a WiFi or cellular antenna? Or both? Dimensions? Polarisation?

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44

It would be nice to have both vertical/bottom and horizontal/side mounting options in one unit.

I do not work for and I am not directly associated with GL.iNet

45

Any RV shows in the US or Europe are recommended to visit?

46

In Germany it would be the Caravan Salon Düsseldorf.

Every vendor of RV and RV equipment is here. Most of the staff is also English speaking and there are visitors from Netherlands, Belgium, Danmark, Austria and Switzerland as well.

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47

A lot of RV’s are still being delivered from the manufacturer with a crappy King router - AC speeds, and only 100MB ethernet!

They do however also include a very good external antenna that uses SMA connection.

I came across the Flint, and then the Slate, and disconnected the King router - but really could use the external antenna during out travels. Our Southern home we have gigabit ethernet plugged into the Flint, and used the Slate AX in our Northern home connected to a good wifi signal - travels in-between varied between having to use cell hotspot or wifi to campground wifi (where the external antenna would have been awesome on either the Flint of the Slate! In one campground that we couldn’t even get cell service, and wifi was very weak, I had to hook the King back up, and was able to connect to the campground wifi using the external antenna, and rather than changing the wifi network for my laptops, Roku, and phones, I just connected the Slate AX to the King.

1 Like
48

I decided to add another reply - as a full-time RV’r, I really am not interested in cellular modems at all! If I was somewhere without any wifi access for very long, I would go with Starlink - due to cellular costs and throttling. Between me and my wife we have 100GB of cell phone hotspot data - that would get us through almost 20 days of my average usage (regularly use 5GB per day due to Broker investment platform). If I was going to be boondocking in the middle of nowhere, there probably would not be any cell service either!

I want to change my vote! Neither 5G or 4G LTE is important to me at all! I love the Slate AX, except for a few issues:

WAN - I have a 150’+ long buried ethernet from the house to the RV - the Slate could not negotiate a Gigabit connection (we have Gigabit Ethernet). A cheap TPLink AX router negotiates to Gigabit just fine, and a cheap NetGear Switch always stays Gigabit - so I used the Switch, and then plugged the Slate AX into it.

Antennas - I have a King external antenna from the RV Factory installed. The King antenna works great, the King router sucks! An external antenna with SMA connection would be a plug and play replacement to the King.

Power source - we have a 1500W invertor, so powering off the existing 120V outlets would be fine - but if it could be wired directly to the 12V system, it would use way less battery power when not on shore power. No USB, or especially USB connections anywhere near where the external antenna wire comes into the RV, but 120V or 12V is readily available.

2.5G WAN port - I will be testing a new switch with 2.5G WAN port - if it works, having 2.5G WAN port in the router would be awesome to give me Gigabit ethernet dedicated for my laptop, and still have a lot of bandwidth available to our WiFi devices. (of course if I am using the external antenna for WiFi repeating, I would not have an ethernet WAN connection anyway).

VPN - I use an OpenVPN Access Server to connect to my home network/server when travelling - even the new Beryl AX only gets 120MB with OpenVPN, which is very disappointing when I may be connected to 2.5GB network/Gigabit Internet.

Internal antennas - although I have been very happy with the wifi coverage inside the large 5th Wheel RV - I am concerned about the small form factor antennas - am totally fine with longer MU-Mimo antennas.

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49

For a travel route I do believe it is unreasonable to want a small, energy efficient router, but also 2,5Gbit OpenVPN connectivity. Your router needs to encrypt and decrypt all traffic going over the VPN, which requires quite a bit of CPU power. Putting in a powerful CPU will make the device bigger and require more energy to run.

50

The current version of the Beryl AX does have 2.5G and VPN, so I don’t think it is too big of an ask, but understand that cost/size/power usage could all suffer. I guess I am much less concerned about the size and travel portability - and if I have to have multiple devices to have the “best” features in each environment, I could live with that. The primary “missing” piece for me is the external SMA antenna connection for use in my RV, and it really doesn’t need to be “travel” size.

51

This looks great if you can get to the manufacturers to use it instead of the King and other suppliers, or for RV’s that didn’t come with one. I am totally happy with the functionality of my King Swift antenna, just not the King router. Just adding a SMA antenna connection any of the existing product line would be a huge improvement for me.

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52

You mean the RV manufacturers? It will be nice if you can give me some big names of RV manufacturers. We will try to reach them.

53

There really are only 3 Big RV Manufacturers!

Forest River (Owned by Berkshire Hathaway

Thor

Grand Design

There are others, but they are much smaller. These 3 account for what seems like 100 different brands.

The other suggestion I have is to try to get onto Camping World’s shelves (and on-line of course!). They have a lot of footprint across the US, and others follow.

ETrailer is another large online seller that has a lot of RV parts.

Another huge suggestion – when I was researching what my options were for internet while travelling, I came across the Mobile Internet Information Center - www.rvmobileinternet.com They review and explain a lot of products – but focus on cellular a little too much for me!

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54

Thanks for the leads. We have some products reviewed by rvmobileinternet.com However, we are still very new to the RV world. We will visit some RV shows to learn more.

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55

One other idea for you - One of the biggest names in RV’s with the manufacturer is King - and their router is VERY outdated, but also they are out of stock on it right now! I bet you could cut a deal to put the King brand on your router, and let them sell it!

There is only AC, but the worst part is that their LAN ports are only 100 MB! Having GigaBit internet, even on ethernet, and be limited to 100 MB is crazy!

56

I really am not concerned very much with the size or energy efficiency - have multiple ways of providing power. Unless of course the option was the size of a suitcase or very energy inefficient! The “travel” size is nice for carrying in a laptop bag, but that isn’t my concern in an RV router. The size of the Flint is just fine for me.

57

As a new member, I am resurrecting this old thread to add a few comments.

I think GL-iNet have done a great job with the Spitz AX. I just received mine yesterday and it hits just about all of the bullet points that I want in a router for our motorhome.

I just wanted to say that it was interesting as a new user who found my way here after buying the Spitz AX, to see so many of the requests/needs of the RV/motorhome community reflected in the released product.

I feel like it is a huge step forward for an affordable, powerful and capable cellular router for the RV mobile internet space.

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58

Wow. This thread is 2 years old.

My original Spitzs are still handling the “mobile” use right now. They are still working fine for what I need them to be (e.g. car-mobile hotspot for the kids to watch YouTube on tablets) so I haven’t felt the need to upgrade them.

I did pick up a Spitz AX and I get about 500Mbps down and 40Mbps up, so I’m using it as a WAN2 on a Netgate firewall/router at home as a failover “backup” to my fiber. I added the Waveform QuadMini 4x4 external antenna to it and it works great.

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59

Did then indoor Wave2 increase your cellular speeds noticeably?

60

Versus the included antennas? No, not really. I had been testing with the included antennas for about a week and then I received the Waveform antenna. While the difference isn’t really noticeable, it did give me a more consistent throughput. Meaning, the variation in speeds were reduced (and latency) in speed tests.

Also, I noticed CA (carrier aggregation) was actually causing the speeds to slow down, sometime quite considerably. So I ended it locking it to a single-band, (5G SA, n41, 100 MHz) and now it operates perfectly.