Air Cards

Bay City, Texas

Weather: low 65 degrees, high 73 degrees, partly cloudy skies to cloudy skies

The woes with cranes inside the containment building continued last night, and didn’t get resolved until just before dayshift started. Once we were able to use the cranes again, we made good progress the rest of the day and it appears we’re back on schedule. Looks like about 15 days to go for me! But who’s counting?

The Texas coast is famous for having weather systems move into an area and sit in one place for days at a time, with heavy rainfall and high winds. Several times in past outages at the job site, I’ve seen torrential downpours that dropped as much as 12 inches of rain in a day. We were concerned about how the weather would affect us for the current outage. So far, the weather has been great. Only a small amount of rain has fallen, and best of all, the temperatures have been very nice, with lows from the 40s to the 60s, and highs in the 60s and 70s. We’ve had some minor delays with cranes due to high winds, but less impact than in past outages. If this is global warming, bring it on.

When we first started this RV lifestyle, we had to search for places to use the Internet. There weren't many libraries that had access at that time, and the few parks that had access had slowwwww systems. Once in a while, we could find an RV park that had wifi systems, but they were usually slow. In 2007, we finally decided to take a chance on buying an air card that we could use with our computer that allowed us to access the Internet through AT&T. The speed of the air card was better than dial up, but slower than most wifi systems.

Eventually, we realized the limitations in accessing a good signal with the air card. In an effort to enhance the signal that we could get, I did some research on ways to improve our signal strength. Eventually, I decided to buy a trucker's cell phone antenna (the air card is nothing but another cell phone) and a signal amplifier. Boy, what a difference those two components made in the accessibility of signals and connection speed. Since we like to travel the back roads and stay in small towns, we have found the antenna and amplifier to be essential to maintaining a good connection to the Internet. Most of the time, the blog is sent out on the air card. It would be much more difficult to stay in touch through the Internet without the extra equipment we added to the system.

There are several different companies that provide air cards, and it appears most people swear by the Verizon system. Recently, I've heard that the Verizon system has slowed down due to the heavy traffic in some places. So far, I've not felt the need to change from AT&T, but if I started having poor service, I would start looking around for a better provider.

More later, be safe.

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Not all who wander are lost.