FAST CHEAP RV INTERNET 2.0 | MoFi + Winegard Air 360+ | Grand Design Solitude 380 FL-R

hey everyone elias here i'm back again um about a month ago i did a video about rv internet a lot of you seem to like that video we've had a lot of views on it uh but there's been some changes uh it cost a little bit more now it was fifteen dollars a month and the cost has gone up now uh to about a little over 23 dollars a month but i'm getting a lot more for uh a few more dollars so let's get right to it i'm coming to you today from the top of our solitude 380 flr and what i want to talk to you about a little bit part of the the video today is about this air 360 plus uh from wineguard this unit right here uh is is a very very uh nice piece of equipment but it's a three in one unit uh one of the things of course it does is your tv antenna that's a separate part of the this unit right here which works very very good um and i'll explain a little bit of that to you when i'm when i'm back inside here in a little bit uh the second part is a cellular antenna and there's actually uh two parts to that and i'll explain that to you when i'm inside as well when i'm showing you some of the wires down there uh and also it's a signal extender and so this the cells uh signal extender sends out the the signal throughout your rig and throughout your area depending on how big your camp campsite is and you can get this signal a lot stronger but uh what i want to talk to you today is about how we're going to use the antennas to be able to strengthen our signal for our internet so let's get right to talk to you about an update uh to our internet for our rv uh if you haven't seen our original video about internet rv for 15 a month uh check it out it's going to be in the upper right hand corner of your screen here right now uh and also i'll link it in the description below um but we've had some changes uh to our internet um in the original video i explained how we're using the uh this unit right here this is the mofi 4500 um cell router and it's been working great for us it's been working excellent and we've really been enjoying using it we've been using it for well over a year now and have no trouble with it at all we started off with att uh we had a uh kind of a standalone plan uh sim card with that and we put it in here and we were running fine with that uh then we turned it off for the summer came back in the in the fall plugged it in and found out that att discontinued the uh standalone plan uh for data so we were kind of at a crossroads of wondering what to do and um uh our son actually had a verizon cell phone plan and so we talked to him about adding a uh just adding a adding a a tablet to his plan and so we we paid that difference it was only 15 a month and that's where i came up with a 15 internet plan uh for our cellular uh our cellular router here the mofi 4500 and um and this worked great we put that sim card for the uh the ipad into this router and it's worked great and there's just a little configuring need to do on the back end of things on on your computer but it's very simple to do and i'll actually link that as well there's another gentleman who does a lot of the technical stuff uh having to do with the mofi 4500 he does a great job with it and no sense of me kind of repeating all that information so i'll link that underneath as well all the technical information but um about a week ago maybe 10 days ago our son contacted us and said hey dad i just paid off our my cell phone and i'm actually going to move away from verizon i'm going with another company he moved states he's in another area right now and so he said there's a great uh company around here for internet or for myself cell phone service and so i'm going to go with them and so he's giving me a little heads up that in about a month's time that that uh sim card you have from verizon is not going to work anymore in my mofi so i actually went online uh to my att uh service my wireless service and i did the same thing i added a um added a tablet to my plan we have two cell phones right now on our plan and so we just added a tablet to the plan i put in there that i'll bring in my own device my own tablet uh my own ipad and all i needed was a sim so they mailed me the sim card when it arrived uh it arrived uh just just you know in an envelope uh very simple instructions the phone number to call i called them up and they activated it real quick over the phone just took two or three minutes they said you're activated you're good to go i said okay so i turned off the mofi and i put in the new sim card right here and um and then restarted it and it worked good it worked it didn't work as good to be honest it didn't work as good as the verizon was working verizon i was getting 15 16 gigabytes uh not gigabytes oh boy that'd be great wouldn't it uh 15 16 megabits per second and um for up for uh for download and for upload i was getting about six or seven maybe eight megabits per second so we were happy with that if you have three uh megabits per second you're able to run netflix you're able to surf you're able to do a lot of things on just three but most of us have many devices right now uh we have several devices in the rv here and i'll kind of walk you through and show you what we have but uh um but when i put this 18t one in here and uh it was running about a little bit less than verizon to be honest uh just a little bit uh slower we're running about seven or eight megabits per second um for for download and maybe five or six for upload which was okay but i mean i'm all about trying to get the best speed i can i'm all about trying to get the best deal that i can and uh i told you in the first video once again go back to the first video and check it out i told you i'm gonna start experimenting with what's up on our roof uh which i showed you here at the beginning of this video the wineguard air 360 plus um antenna uh is is on our roof it came with this unit we we this unit is a grand design solitude 380 flr the residential unit and i began doing some research about that wineguard 360 air plus and found out and actually talked to a representative from weingart about this and the one the representative was telling me that the owner of weingart actually did uh they spent about a year doing research trying to find the best uh technology find the best just information about uh putting together the best product that he could and spent well over a million dollars just doing research about this product and the product turn out to be what's on our roof right now the wineguard 360 plus air 360 plus and so i thought we have this right here on our roof why can't we utilize the strength of it why can't we utilize the technology that's here uh with the mofi 4500 i thought if we can somehow bring them together mesh them together we'll be able to come up with something great i felt like we could and so i'm all about experimenting i'm all about uh trying to do different things that i'm not afraid to take risks and things like that and so uh one of the things that i really liked about the the wineguard on the roof is that uh it has three and three antennas with it's got three three parts to the the whole system number one it's a tv antenna um and and if you're you got you've got your rv you've got a tv of course you want to get some channels in and what i love about it is is this wine guard it sends out a signal for 55 miles out there to be able to get the signal so when we turn our tv on it scans the area for 55 miles and normally we're able to get in 40 to 50 channels right away without any tinkering without any you know adjusting things or anything like that that wineguard is a powerful powerful device and so i thought if i can just somehow utilize that that technology for our internet signal that would be amazing that'd be like that would be a win-win situation so i showed you and i'm going to show you again here real quick here um these are the cords that are coming out of the uh the wine guard here's the wine guard here this is what you connect here and they make this they make this um so that you can buy their product they have the wine guard has a product that you put up here uh is very much it's pretty much the same thing as the mofi but it's just different technologies their technology and and what they want you do of course they want you to buy their their uh their router uh to put up here and you can put a sim card in and they have they have uh all their information about that on their website and you can do that if you want to and that's fine if you wanna do if you don't have the mofi you can do that if you want to it's about 300 it's about the same thing as what the mofi costs but i've already spent the money for the mofi and so i don't want to buy another unit i don't want to buy another piece of equipment and so um i'm trying to figure out how to get the mofi connected to this and so uh these these these little cables here little cords they're they're pretty thin and uh to find actually the uh uh the correct connections it was pretty challenging to be honest and then of course to be able to find the right cords to go with it but i found them it was uh it was a pretty tedious um operation but i was able to find them so there's a little connector here that connects the cord uh this this cable to um the wine guard right here and there's a connector here and then then this screws into here and this cable actually is about 10 foot long right now i wasn't sure how long i needed it so right now it just kind of snakes through here and it comes over here as i'm testing it and it connects into my mofi right here so the two of them right here and uh these are the paddles that come with the mofi and um and and they work really good to be honest but uh when i connected this up here and and and then uh just turn it off did it kind of reset and turn it back on uh this signal that i'm getting with this is extra strong it's really really good it's doing really really well um and i'm going to show you here just a second actually i'll do it right now uh kind of live on here let me uh hold on i don't want to see my password i get that on there those are the numbers i got the last time i tested it i'm downloading 38.5 and uploading seven now my upload doesn't look great and but you know what to be honest i didn't need a great upload speed um as long as i'm getting three four five i'm happy with that but the download is what i want i want download speed because um of all the different devices that we have and i'm gonna show you what we have but uh let's just um let me just reload this page and then we're gonna run this test again and we'll see what the speed gets us right now and i haven't done this um that was probably three four hours ago that i did that that last test that you saw wow that i mean i'm i i hadn't seen 30 um on the other i with the verizon at all i was up to close to 20 but to get 33 download 34 download is amazing to me let's just check out the upload here the upload looks about the same as before once again i'm happy with seven i i'm i'm very happy with seven for upload it's the download that i really want to do good okay so i'm very happy with those speeds that we just did there um one of the things i want to uh to show you real quick again is just these wires here um just so you kind of know what they are this wire here uh the the bigger wire that's just 12 volt so um weingart when they have their mobile router they put right here um this way you can plug right into it and you have 12 volts going right to it now the only other wires are coming out are these three wires here the green the yellow and the red the red zone you don't have to worry about this one is for the wi-fi extender uh to to send the signal up further that's one of the things that the wine guard up on top of the roof does for you but the only two you have to worry about are the yellow and the green these are for just for the uh cell antenna um so what i'm going to do um i'm probably not going to do this yet because i want to make sure i do it right is i'm going to wind up tucking these wires up in the hole here and then i'm gonna fish it over through the uh the air conditioner here and over through here to this cabinet and then i'm gonna actually come down through here in the cabin i'm gonna mount so i'm gonna mount it in here somewhere maybe i'll mount it over here i'm not sure but uh that's the plan right now but uh you might think well uh you know i don't have the wine guard uh we don't have the wine guard on our rv you don't have to have the wine guard i'm just if you happen to have it already it's a great piece of technology to utilize and so i just wanted to to share that with you if you don't have a wine guard what i would do if you're trying to get a better signal um rather than using something like that i would probably look into getting a yagi antenna these these mofis have done very very well with yagi's and there's other videos online about it but you just connect the yagi in here like this you'll you'll need different cords um also you'll need a longer one you probably need 25 30 feet maybe longer depending on the size of your rv and where you're going to put it but the longer your cable though is the the less uh or the more loss you're going to have on your signal so you want to keep it as short as possible right now i kind of wish this this cable was a little shorter but when i look at the run i've got to make with it to tuck it away where i want it because i don't like i don't like cords and wires sticking out everywhere uh this kind of thing right here uh drives my wife and i crazy to see this and have all these cables and everything going everywhere but um so i i feel good about actually having the the uh the 10 foot uh cable so one of the things that i want to also mention was that not only do we have the um we have the mofi here but we have two cell phones running we're running an ipad we're running a uh a laptop we're running a uh we're streaming videos on our 50-inch um tv and we also have a an alexa in the back and uh she probably heard me say that um and uh we also have a another tv in the back in the back bedroom it's not a smart tv but we have an amazon fire stick that's attached to it which makes it a smart smart tv and so um how many how many items is that two phones computer laptop uh computer and ipad i mean uh two tvs and then alexa so seven seven smart devices we have connected to it so that's quite a bit and everything can run with no problem with this so i hope this helps you if you have the weingart air 360 um maybe you can work on getting this setup going um it's totally up to you though it worked for me uh you know do it at your own risk kind of thing um some people said oh you shouldn't hook up this or that uh to it but like i said i'm not afraid to take some risk to you know for a great reward and i feel like this is a great reward uh with this speed that we we're going to be getting are we actually getting now so we're looking forward to it you hear the dog down here look you want to see what jasper's doing he's he doesn't care what i'm doing he won't be quiet uh but that's why we don't do much editing to our videos he just tries to he wants to be the ham of the show but anyway i hope this helps you and if you want to do that you can you can actually look down in the description i'm going to have the different parts that i used the different connectors the cable and things like that just to make it easy for you they're not even at the time of this video right now they're not even amazon affiliate links are just links to help you out okay now sometime in the future they may turn into that but we'll see how that goes now if this video has been helped you please subscribe to our channel we'd appreciate that very much and like the video thank you so much god bless you bye-bye

Channel: RV - Simple Life

Views: 23,478

Keywords: RV Internet, MoFi 4500, Winegard Air 360+, Grand Design Solitude 380 FL, Camper Internet

Id: UyRSr8DkRKA

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021