We had originally planned to make a big trip this summer, starting with the Escapade ’22 in Tennessee, spending a month in Massachusetts, and finally the month of August visiting family in Windsor, Ontario. Covid and a recurrence of Shelley’s breast cancer put an end to those plans.
While we were forced to drop the first two parts, we are in a position now to do the third part and spend the month of August in Windsor.
We needed to get the RV safety inspected and registered, so we took Monday 7/25 to do that. When one lives full-time in an RV, it tends to require a lot of picking up and bolting down before it can head back out onto the road. So we spend the week beforehand doing just that.
We setup a Wyze camera at the site so we could keep an eye on things while we’re gone, and of course the Tesla has built-in security cameras that we can monitor.
Shelley had forgotten to pick up a prescription the day before, so we had to wait for the pharmacy to open and run to get that. While she did that I put all the stuff in our yard into the shed.
So we headed out Tuesday morning about 10:30, a bit later than planned but in no rush anyways.
In July ’21 we decided to get out of the Austin heat for awhile, so hauled the rig up to Chama for three weeks in the New Mexico mountains.
We stayed in 2 separate RV parks, both of which were quite nice.
The 1st RV Park
We went downtown quite often for a meal or just coffee.
Downtown Chama
Shelley setup the hummingbird feeders, including putting one on her finger. The hummingbirds were interested and came quite close to Shelley’s ring feeder.
Feeding the Hummingbirds
While we were there we of course took a ride on the Cumbres Toltec Railroad. This is one of only a few narrow gauge railroads.
Our lunch stop off in the distance
We rode most of the way in one of the open flat cars. The view was great, but we ended up with soot all over us.
An Aspen stand just outside of town
These trains are narrow gauge in order to make the sharp turns necessary in some of the mountain passes.
The lower path seen here is the highway, which is much newer than the original train tracks which are shown above it, and much more precariously cut into the side of the cliff.
Shelley Saying Goodbye
We were sad to leave, but it’s always nice to head back home.
A couple nights ago my side of our Sleep Number bed started leaking. I woke up in a pit with my hip hurting from laying against the plywood underneath the mattress.
Chica likes sleeping in a trough.
Ron’s side of the bed doesn’t hold air, but Chica doesn’t seem to mind at all.
I’m able to fill it back up, but it’s flat again within a couple hours. Sleep Number has very good help information on their website, and we were able to determine by swapping the left and right side hoses that the problem is with the airbag on my side, and not the pump or hoses.
So I contacted Sleep Number, and they checked my warranty status and are sending replacement airbags at a discounted price to us here at the RV park in Chama, NM. They have very good instructions on how to replace it, including a help video.
So upon receiving the replacement airbags we followed the installation video instructions and about 45 minutes later I’m back sleeping on air.
Installing the new air bag
Overall I’ve been very impressed with the level of service, not something that I can say very often.
As I’ve written about previously, I use the garage in our toy hauler RV as my office. One of the cool features that came with the garage is a motorized mechanism that allows the bench seats/lower bed to be raised from bed/bench height all the way to the ceiling. Since we don’t really use the lower bed, I decided to convert it into a motorized standing desk.
Desk lowered for sitting
I simply removed the legs from the table I was currently using, and mounted the table to the existing bed brackets. The motor can be used to position the desk at any height.
Desk Raised for Standing
To use the stepper exerciser, I need to raise the desk even higher.
Desk Raised Higher for Exercising
And finally, if I need the space for hauling a motorcycle or whatever, I can raise the desk up to the ceiling.
With all the rain we’ve had this season, we are finding ourselves inundated with mosquitos, and of course some of them find themselves getting inside the RV. It’s hard to concentrate on my work with those pesky things buzzing around me.
Well, I don’t have any problem with flying insects in my office anymore.
Our resident mosquito control
This little guy has setup shop near the door between my office and the living area in our RV. It sets up its web every night, and takes it down mid-morning. This is classic Orb spider behavior. It seems to alternate daily between which side of the web it is on.
The only drawback to this mosquito control solution is that I tend to forget that it’s there. Unless I turn the light on right next to the web, it is completely invisible. It’s right a face level for me as I enter the office. One night I went into the office to close my blinds and ended up walking face first right into the web, destroying it.
I’m pretty sure that it was unhappy about that, but it rebuilt the next night so I think we’re all good.
Last time we stayed at Leisure Resort on the San Marcos river in Fentress we had a Matt, an RV repairman come out to look at a fresh water leak in our RV. While he was here he inspected the roof also. We’ve accrued quite a bit of damage from overhanging limbs over the past 3 years, so it was about time to get that fixed. Since these were all moving related accidents, it was covered by our insurance.
A shady spot for doing the work. The temp got up to 98 by the afternoon.
So we made arrangement to come back and have Matt replace the damaged roof surface. We scoped out the park and reserved a shady spot for 5 days. The work itself only takes a couple days, but we didn’t know if we’d need to wait a couple days for any rain, etc.
So the weather cooperated and work began bright and early Monday morning. We camped out at our grand-daughter Gillian’s apartment in San Marcos since they had to remove the air conditioners. They had the A/C back installed by 6 so we could return for the night.
After everything was removed from the roof, the old surface was removed and a new sheet applied. Matt’s team was quick to reinstall the A/C so we could return at the end of the day.
My Work Office overlooking the San Marcos river at Leisure Resort, Fentress, TX
So I’m just stuck here working on the side of the San Marcos river while they finish up the roof today.
One of the trouble spots with my RV home automation system has been the MQTT server. I know that should be a fairly simple component, but it seems that fairly frequently things will stop working, and the problem is that the MQTT server hung up, or rebooted and didn’t fully restart. I’m currently using an old Mac Mini mounted under my desk, and that’s the problem. Even after experimenting with settings and configuration, I continue to have problems. So I considered and prototyped a couple other options, but each had its own problems. So now I have switch to using a dedicated Raspberry Pi.
Let me clarify that I think that MQTT running on a Mac Mini is awesome, and a very good addition to a home automation system. It’s just that for my RV home automation where the power is constantly being turned on and off as I travel, it tends to be problematic. I’m hoping that a dedicated Raspberry Pi running off the 12 volt system, and doing nothing but running an MQTT broker will be much more robust.
With my recently upgraded cellular modem setup, my internet is pretty reliable and works even when I’m moving down the road. I depend on having a consistent internet connection in order to use Alexa. I’m going to power the Raspberry Pi with a 12v to 5v converter, so the MQTT broker should be always available.
Particle.io Cloud Limits
I would have loved to be able to just switch to using the particle.io cloud for all MQTT messaging, but the number of message permitted on the free plan is only 100k messages per month, which averages out to about 2 messages per minute across all devices. This isn’t enough because I also write timestamp, synchronization, and diagnostic logging messages over MQTT which can greatly exceed this.
Cloud MQTT
I looked at several cloud based MQTT brokers, and most would have some sort of small monthly fee associated with it. These include HiveMQ, Adafruit.io, and Google IoT. But using these didn’t really reduce the complexity of the system, which was a big reason for even exploring this.
Raspberry Pi Zero W
So I decided on using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and ordered a CanaKit and a 12v to 5v converter for $45 off Amazon. This came with everything I needed, some of which won’t be used once all the software is loaded and configured.
Rapsberry Pi Zero W configured with Mosquitto MQTT broker
So after some simple configuration of the included NOOBs operating system included on the 16 gig SD card, I installed Mosquitto and now have a full-time, dedicated MQTT broker for under $50.
After spending a full month on the road in the RV, and returning home to a broken park internet, it because clear that we needed a more robust internet solution.
Our Current Setup
For this trip we had been using:
Verizon 75G phone plans on both our iPhones (each with 30 GB hotspot)
Verizon Jetpack 15 GB hotspot as backup
AT&T 100G plan on an old iPhone 6 (with 30 GB hotspot)
Sprint/T-Mobile LinkZone 2 unlimited hotspot.
This provided us with a lot of data on multiple carriers, but was pretty labor intensive selecting which device(s) worked, monitoring the bandwidth, switching as we moved, etc. We also had to be very careful to not burn through all our data when watching TV, movies, etc. Since we had a lot more data available on our phone than via hotspot, we tried connecting our TV to the phones as an external display, but this made for a very frustrating experience. We ended up needing to reconnect and/or restart frequently, not to mention getting tangled up in the HDMI and power cables strung across the room.
New Hardware
So after doing a lot of research when we got home, I came to the conclusion that the absolute best solution for working remotely, full time RVers like us would be the MobileMustHave.com Ultimate Road Warrier package. This package includes a Pepwave Transit Duo mobile router and a Parsec 7-in-1 roof antenna. It is one of the most expensive packages, at around $1,500, but has an amazing set of capabilities.
The mobile router has 2 cellular receivers built in, with 2 SIM slots each (4 SIM slots total). This allows automatically selecting the carrier that works best, and failing over to another carrier when one isn’t working. It can also do some really fancy things like ‘bonding’ both receivers to double the cellular bandwidth for a single connection.
Best of all, a lot of things can be configured to happen automatically, such as limiting each SIM to a specified bandwidth and data cap, then rolling over to the next SIM. And the status, bandwidth, and data usage can be reviewed and modified in one place.
Both are 12v powered, so the entire setup will continue to work either parked or while moving down the road.
I can’t even begin to describe all that this setup can do, so I’ll just refer you to the MobileMustHave website. They have a lot of videos there and on their Youtube channel.
Data Plans
So having picked a dual cellular mobile router, I’d need a couple hotspot data plan SIMs. Searching for high capacity data plans took a lot of investigation also. The information available from the Mobile Internet Resource Center as well as MobileMustHave.com was very helpful, and helped steer me away from some “too good to be true” plans. I want fairly reliable plans so I don’t have to spend a lot of time interacting with support when the plans just stop working.
During our travels, both Verizon and AT&T had very good coverage. My Sprint/T-Mobile hotspot didn’t do as well. I believe their coverage is better up north, but this past trip was across the south. So I was leaning towards Verizon and AT&T.
Since we already have Verizon plans for our phones, a good choice for us is the hotspot add-on to our plans. For $15 we could get a separate 30 GB hotspot SIM. We had previously added a Jetpack on an older plan that gave us 15 GB for $10/month. So I upgraded it to the 30 GB for $15/month plan, and added a second one for our other line. So that gave me two SIMs providing 30 GB each.
I really wanted AT&T plans for the other 2 slots. At first look, the AT&T plans were quite expensive, and didn’t provide a lot of data. But then I came across their Prepaid plans. Wow. They offer 100 GB prepaid hotspot plans for $55/month. So I got two of those also.
So now I have 2 x 100 GB AT&T for my primary carrier, with 2 x 30 GB Verizon backup/rollover. These can both be configured using Peplink SpeedFusion to provide double the bandwidth if/when needed. I’ll be checking into that later, but for now I think my cellular capability is good.
Controlling Data Usage
As I mentioned above, one of the frustrating aspects of using cellular data is having to monitor our usage, and adjust things to avoid running out of data. The Pepwave router makes this very easy. It has provisions for monitoring usage, throttling bandwidth on a per device or user group basis, and turning off or rolling over to another service when a threshold is reached.
I’ve been experimenting with the amount of bandwidth needed for our TV, and have been surprised. Left in its default state, watching TV can consume way over 10 Mbps, which results in over 10 GB per day with as much video as we often stream in the evenings. So I used the Pepwave advanced settings to limit bandwidth to the TV to smaller and smaller bandwidths. I had expected that as I dropped below 8 Mbps the picture would noticeably deteriorate, and become unusable below about 5 Mbps.
But what I found was that the picture was still pretty good with the bandwidth limited to 3 Mbps.
Wifi as WAN
The icing on the cake for this device is the ability to connect to a park’s Wifi and use it as an input to the router. The Wifi at each new park we visit can be quickly configured and used instead of cellular if needed.
StarLink
I’m currently signed up to receive StarLink when it becomes available later this year, but I’m thinking I may not need it. Equipment is $499 up front and doesn’t appear RV friendly, monthly fees are $99, the service area is limited to a specific local “cell”.
Maybe in the future they will offer an RV friendly plan, but until then I’ll probably stick with cellular plus park Wifi.
Something we’ve learned after just a couple weeks into our month long Tampa trip is how wonderful the lunch breaks can be. Even with fairly short travel days, it is great to split the driving into two segments, with a lunch and nap break in the middle.
In the past when we’ve stopped driving for a break, we would confine ourselves to using the office/garage so we wouldn’t have to mess with pulling the slides out. The way our RV is built, you can’t really use the front 3/4ths of the RV without pulling the 3 slides out. This includes the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and main bathroom. But the office/garage is fully accessible with its own door, and includes a half bathroom, table, bed, and piano. So we’d sometimes pack a lunch and put it into the outside kitchen refrigerator along with a couple drinks, and then eat lunch in the office.
Well this past trip we pulled into a rest area, parking in the truck/bus/RV section as instructed. We noticed that these pull through spots are really wide, and in fact we could pull out the slides and still fit between the lines. So we did.
Fire up the generator, kick in the A/C, and bring out the slides, and we have our full home available for cooking or making lunch, and taking a nap afterwards in our own bed.
On our way to Tampa we stopped about half way at Meaher State Park in Alabama. It’s located across the bay from Mobile. We arrived here Sunday afternoon, then I worked from here for the week.
It’s a very nice park with a lot of space between sites. We also stayed here Saturday night on our return back from Tampa.
