Saturday, October 27, 2018

Day 43 - Verde Valley RV Park, AZ - TT

I dug the pedal-assist bike out this morning and rode around the campground. The pool is less than a mile but still, it would be quite the walk back due to the warm temperatures and hilly terrain. This is the "H" campgrounds where we are staying. It is uphill from the "A", "B" and "C" sections which are near the pool. There are also some tent areas as well as long-term leased sections. The e-bike makes riding pretty easy even with the hills. Pedaling is still required but not much. Especially if you want to stay within the park speed limit.

The pool is actually heated so I will definitely be back this afternoon. Internet within the lodges is definitely decent enough and our space is anout 100 yards from one of the lodges and the Ubiquity antenna can pick up the lodge wifi. I did need to move the antenna to the rear living area to have fewer obstructions. A lot less bandwidth that if you are in the lodge but sufficient. This is convenient as Verizon is kind of marginal and Verizon (and AT&T) will route voice and text over the Internet. Between one and two bars of LTE but zero throughput at the campsite. BTW, we do not have an external cell antenna like many other RVers as the Internet is really only needed for these blog posts.

I have been using the Raspberry Pi DMR hotspot when stopped. It needs an Internet connection to reach the bridges. Radio frequency is only used for me to communicate with the hotspot. I'm using simplex on a UHF frequency (70 cm band) so the range is very limited. Especially since the hotspot radio is only a tenth of a watt. Very little bandwidth is needed. So far, about all I’ve used the hotspot for is participating in the Alaska statewide DMR net on Monday evenings. And talkgroup 310 which is North America. 

6 comments:

  1. What with all the boondocking I prefer to do, my own Ubiquity wifi booster rarely gets used. Some day, I'll be free of the chains of internet access for work....

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    1. We will actually be trying out boondocking for the first time in January at Quartzfest, an amatuer radio "event".

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  2. Riding a bike to a swimming pool... sounds like too much sports to me ;-)

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    1. I don’t do any “swimming” in the pool. Just alternate between the pool, the hot tub and a chaise. And this e-bike has very little resemblance to exercise.

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  3. The e-bike is perfect for this type of campground. That reminds me, we need to get ours out! 😀

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