Car PC Hacks
Hack 68. Find WiFi Hotspots on the Road
WiFi is the best friend of the well-connected commuter and traveler. Early last spring I sold my business, moved into an RV, and took off traveling. I have been on the road for six months now, cruising from the east coast of the U.S. to Alaska. During this time I've managed to access the Internet nearly as often as I like, staying in touch with friends and family via email and maintaining an active web site. I also use an Internet telephone account to make and receive phone calls through my laptop whenever I'm online. For anyone contemplating long-term travel and wanting to stay "connected," perhaps some of my own experiences and discoveries of late may prove useful. 6.8.1. Staying Free and Connected on the Road
Once I hit the road, I discovered a variety of ways and means for getting online. I should mention here that although more and more commercial RV parks are offering Internet connections to their overnight guests these days, I have never once stayed in such a place. I prefer the roads less traveled and the places less visited: free, secluded campsites along National Forest back roads and streams, in the countryside, and on empty beaches. Still, I manage to get online quite often. For example, whenever I visit a friend with broadband access, I just bring my laptop in and connect it.
It's also possible to connect through a cell phone [Hack #62], and this may be the best solution for many travelers. Unfortunately, a cell phone connection was not an option for me. I was planning to hang out in the northwestern U.S. National Forests, where cell phones generally don't work; in western Canada, where there is no cell phone service at all outside of a few big towns; and in the wilder parts of road-accessible Alaska, where coverage is sparse to nonexistent. Public libraries are a good place to look for an emergency Internet connection, although it is rarely wireless. A few I've come across are set up to allow visitors to plug in their own PCs, and one on Orcas Island off the northwest coast of Washington actually provided WiFi in addition to cable connections. That was the exception, however. Many coffee houses today also offer Internet connections (cable, wireless, or both). Some of them charge; some don't as long as you buy something while you're there. These cozy Internet cafés are a pleasant alternative to sitting alone in my RV, and I use them from time to time. However, I much prefer to download incoming email onto my own laptop to read and file at my leisure, and I usually compose and answer emails when I'm camped out in the woods, to be sent the next time I log on. In addition, I often want to upload files from my laptop's hard drive to my web site, which I can't easily do using someone else's computer. 6.8.2. Finding WiFi
Of course, the RV PC holy grail is a free WiFi hotspot, and finding these on the road can become an art and an obsession. A WiFi hotspot is an area where an Internet connection is available through localized radio waves rather than through a hard-wired cable hookup. As long as your computer is set up to receive these signals and you're within their (typically limited) broadcast range, you can get online without plugging in. My laptop came ready-made with a built-in WiFi card and antenna to access wireless signals. Computers without this feature can usually be upgraded with a plug-in wireless PC card and a small external antenna. For the RV vagabond, the appearance of the screen message "One or more wireless networks are available" is always welcomedit's kind of like finding money on the street. If you're already online, you can often locate some local hotspots simply by doing a search at web sites that list them, such as http://www.jiwire.com. However, these sites often don't list all of the hotspots in a given town, and sometimes they don't list any at all where they actually do exist. New WiFi hotspots spring up all the time, as anyone with a broadband Internet connection and a hundred-dollar Linksys access point can create one. One tactic I use to find hotspots is to set up my laptop on the passenger seat of my RV and slowly cruise through a town or city, watching for that heartwarming "One or more wireless networks are available" message. Not all of the signals are useful, however. The provider of a WiFi signal can, if he chooses, block access to it so that only those who know the password can log on. These protected signals are obviously intended for the benefit of members or paying customers only and are therefore of no use to me. It's the free, unblocked WiFi signals I'm looking for. When I come across an accessible hotspot, I pull over and see if I can spot the source. Whoever is transmitting a wireless signal gets to name it, and the receiving computer displays that name. Sometimes the network name will indicate plainly that it's coming from this office or that café. Others bear cryptic names that have no obvious meaning to anyone besides the owner. If I can't guess the signal's source, I might move around a bit in an effort to home in on it, but regardless of whether or not I ever actually locate the signal source, once I've got a strong connection I'm in hacker's heaven. I can then sit in the comfort of my motor home with a hot mug of tea on the table and Mozart on the stereo, sending and receiving emails and surfing the Web to my heart's contentfor free! I also make all my phone calls then, which I'll tell you more about later in this hack. During these months traveling in my RV, I have found WiFi signals in some interesting and unlikely places. Once I pulled off Interstate 40 at one of those exits where a bunch of motels, gas stations, and chain restaurants are clustered togethera commercial oasis in the middle of nowhere. On a lark, I booted up the laptop, and bingo! There was a good signal coming from a Best Western motel. So I parked discretely in a corner of their parking lot and spent a happy hour sending email from the Texas prairie while tumbleweed rolled across the road two blocks away. On another occasion, I had parked way out on a beach point near a town on Vancouver Island. I had already searched the small community for a WiFi hotspot without success, yet when I fired up my laptop to do some writing a strong WiFi signal magically appeared. I was surrounded by ocean, sand, and city parkland, yet I sat chatting with friends back east through my laptop as though I was next door. My best guess was that the signal emanated from the high school's administration offices on a hill nearly a mile away, but I never really knew (and it never really mattered). Most recently, I've been using a WiFi signal I found on the town docks in beautiful Seward, Alaska, broadcast by one of the tour boat operators there. I park my RV a stone's throw from their cabin-like ticket office and surf and email and make phone calls while gazing at glacier-clad mountains across the bay, where bald eagles fly and bears fish for salmon in the streams. 6.8.3. Improving Reception
Capturing strong WiFi signals is the key to happy RV PC hacking. I bought a 4' long, fiberglass-encased antenna to increase my signal quality, but erecting it outside the RV each time I wanted to use it was usually more hassle than the slight improvement in reception was worth. In the end, I tended to leave the antenna up more often than I should have, projecting several feet above the roof of my RV (which already stands 10' above the road). One day, while I was hunting for WiFi signals in downtown Kamloops, British Columbia, I pulled up to a curb to park, failed to notice an overhanging tree branch, and snap! There went my expensive external antenna. I'd like to try out a directional antenna, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. For the time being, I manage to find enough WiFi signals to carry on just using my laptop's built-in antenna. (For more on WiFi reception, see "Get Online in Your Car" [Hack #62]). 6.8.4. Internet Telephone over WiFi
In addition to staying connected via email with my RV PC, I also have an Internet telephone account with Vonage (http://www.vonage.com). This is one of the relatively new, groundbreaking Internet telephone companies that are, I believe, heralding the end of home and office telephone service as we know it. Rather than using traditional telephone systems for phone calls, these companies use the Internet to carry voice communications. This technology, called Voice over IP (VoIP), enables the calls to avoid expensive switching fees and a host of petty taxes that drive up "normal" phone bills every month.
You can even cut the last cord tethering you to your permanent residence: your home phone number. If you haven't already ditched it for a mobile phone, you can transfer your traditional landline number over to Vonage, and keep the phone number you've had at your home for so many years. Unfortunately, Vonage's standard package and service do require a bit of hardware (which they give you) and a hard-wired (Ethernet) connection to the Internet. They also offer a "SoftPhone" package, which works directly through a laptop computer and a wireless connection, without the extraneous hardware; however, they would not sell me the SoftPhone package alone. I had to first sign up for the Residential Basic 500 plan, which I cannot use, and then add on the SoftPhone package for an additional $10 (plus tax) per month. Also, the SoftPhone package doesn't offer "all you can eat" flat-fee calling, like their equipment-based plans do. Still, I am paying less than $30 (including tax) a month to have wireless Internet telephone capability, including voicemail that is accessible both by telephone and online. I can park my RV (or just myself with my laptop) in any hotspot, plug my operator-style headset and microphone into the computer, and chat with friends and family as if I were calling from a landline.
While it wasn't ideal for my purposes, as it happens, the Vonage hardware limitation can also work to your benefit. While "Get Online in Your Car" [Hack #62] showed you how to use your dial-up connection to make your own WiFi hotspot, with Vonage you can do the oppositeuse your laptop or car PC to turn a WiFi connection into a hardwire connection for your phone. On Windows XP, there is a feature called "Internet Connection Sharing." Once your laptop or car PC is connected to the WiFi connection you want to use, you can share this connection through your Ethernet port. Go to Control Panels To accomplish the same thing on a Macintosh, just go to System Preferences It gets better. I plan to be on the road in New Zealand soon, but Vonage treats all my phone calls as originating in the United States, no matter where in the world I happen to be when I log onto the Internet. Thus, when I log on over there, I'll still be able to use my Internet telephone system to call anywhere in the U.S. and Canada, and I won't have to pay any overseas charges! 6.8.5. Conclusion
As computers and the Internet continue to evolve, people are finding new ways of applying these tools to suit the way they live and work. Footloose travelers like me can now stay as connected as they want to bewell, almost. I foresee a day of omnipresent, broadband WiFi signals worldwide, so that we'll be able to log onto the Internet while parked in an RV in the deepest forest or sailing a boat in the middle of the ocean. In fact, the beginnings of that technology are already available, but that's another story altogether. Tor Pinney, J.P. Stewart, and Damien Stolarz |