How to Install WiFi in your Vehicle

hey what's up guys so in this video we're going to be talking about adding Wi-Fi to your car variety of different ways that you can do it and some of the reasons why you may want to do it in the first place now I've been running it here in my car for a little while now and I've actually found it to be pretty useful so for example if I'm running maybe the escort max 360 see radar detector it can connect to the cloud over Wi-Fi it can do that over the phone of course but I'd notice with the phone app the connection isn't always as reliable every time I get back in the car whereas over Wi-Fi it connects every single time plus I get the automatic updates and everything I run a black view dr 900s two-channel dash cam I've got the 750 on the rear window back there and it's got a lot of really useful extra cloud functionality so in case I want to manually record a clip or in case of an accident like when I got rear-ended before I went on vacation that video clip can automatically get uploaded to the cloud so now I have a second copy of it in addition to what's stored on the memory card itself it was also pretty cool while I was then on vacation I could actually remotely log in and see the text actually working on my car I get a notification when something's happening to the car and I couldn't actually tap in it's like a security camera almost and see what's going on I use that feature all the time - if I'm just out and about and parked and I may be in a sketchy area I can just check in and make sure there's nothing going on with my car if there is the dash cam will let me know and then I can always go in and see in real time what's going on that feature of course does require Wi-Fi and power when my car is parked not only when it's turned on but that's a pretty useful feature there's also things like in the app I can see where the car is located so in case I park in a parking lot I can't find the car I could just pull it up in real time on the phone or if the car gets stolen I'm able to track it which is really helpful there's also things like if I've got friends and family with me maybe out of the country and they don't have us data they can just hop on my Wi-Fi now they've got internet access for whatsapp or whatever they need I was talking about this on Facebook with a lot of you guys and you'd mention that if you've got kids in the car you can give them Wi-Fi so they can maybe watch movies while you drive play games on their phone or tablet things like that now there's a variety of ways of actually getting Wi-Fi in the car and a lot of newer cars these days actually have Wi-Fi built in you just need to pay for the data plan from your cell phone provider and then boom the car actually provides a Wi-Fi hotspot for you if you've got that that's obviously gonna be the easiest solution though usually that works only for when you're driving and also when you're parked now another option is to simply enable tethering off your phone and share your phone's internet connection with other devices this works pretty well as well though something I notice is with the iPhone at least I have to manually go in and enable tethering every time I can connect automatically with my laptop but for most devices actually have to go into the phone and turn on tethering I know with Android you have more kind of automation capabilities and so you can say when maybe my phone connects to my car's Bluetooth connection then maybe that should be a trigger to activate the tethering and make it available for other devices so you've got a little bit more control over Bluetooth this does require your phone and again if you want the park stuff which I do but I know not everybody does if you want the park stuff you're probably not gonna want to leave your phone in the car unless maybe you have a second phone that's always plugged in or something but that's another option that you can go for now a lot of cell phone companies actually sell dedicated devices which is what I wound up doing in my car to add Wi-Fi Verizon has a bunch I talked to their texts and they said the ones that they sell you have to manually turn them on every time to enable the Wi-Fi whereas I want something I could just get in the car and it always works even if everything's turned off I want the Wi-Fi to automatically turned on AT&T sells a number of these things the text that I talked to said that the ones that they sell they automatically turn on when you get in the car and he wasn't super confident about that so maybe we'll double-check if you're an AT&T person but that's what I found now I'm a t-mobile person and the solution that I found is t-mobile sells a device called the sync up drive - now this is basically an obd2 device that plugs into your car's obd2 port and then when the car provides power here it creates a Wi-Fi hotspot in your car for other devices to connect to this is the route that I've gone but I've made a little modification this because it plugs into your car's obd2 port there's two issues that I kind of wanted to avoid going that route the first one is it's only going to provide power here again when your car is on which depending on your use case may be totally fine but because I wanted parked power I actually have this plugged into a dedicated battery pack in the rear of my vehicle that I also use to power my dash cams while I parked now that has another secondary benefit which is increased security these types of devices people have been able to hack into some of them I don't know about this one in particular but some of these Bluetooth type devices if you can hack into it this plugs into your cars can pewter and then people may be able to go in and access maybe unlock your car doors break into your car control your car things like that I don't know how big of a risk it is but I have heard of that happening and so I didn't necessarily want this plugged into my car's obd2 port for security reasons and so both for security as well as for having it powered when I parked I actually have this plugged into a dedicated dashcam battery again in the back I've got some black Phoebe 124's and some cell Lincoln neo battery packs and some expansions now in order to have this actually powered while in parked the way that I did that is I well of course wanted to plug it into the battery and I found this cigarette lighter to obd2 cable on Amazon basically we'll just plug into your battery and then the sync of Drive would plug into that and boom you've got power now one of the issues that I found is it only worked for a couple minutes and then even when it was still getting power it would actually shut off my Wi-Fi my Wi-Fi connection so I did a little bit more research and I found another cable a similar device and it actually says it's designed for the sync up drive and it actually says in the description that it's designed to stay on for more than five minutes even when your car is parked and the cable is more expensive it's about fifty bucks but it actually does do the job and so here's that cable it's just a obd2 connector and a USB port so I plug this guy into this and then I plug this into the battery because it's a USB port I had to get another adapter to convert the cigarette lighter to a USB port plus it also splits it so now I can plug in a dashcam and additional devices like my Wi-Fi hotspot as well and so the route that I've done is I've got a cell link vo battery pack which then goes into a splitter to power both the dashcam as well as give me the USB port that I need which then goes into this cable which then adapts and connects to the sync up drive - and that's the way that I've done it here in my car this device retails for $100 when I went into t-mobile they had a promotion so I got it for free cool and then I paid 10 bucks a month for 2 gigs of data which is sufficient for what I need for uploading videos Wi-Fi connections from n dashcams things like that your provider of course you've got AT&T or Verizon or Sprint or whatever may have different rates may be unlimited data different pricing whatever so of course check with your provider whoever you have and I'll link to all these different types of devices for AT&T Verizon etc I'll just link to everybody's different ones down in the video description so you can take a look at that as well as the devices that I use the cables that I found do work and things like that so again there's a bunch of different ways to actually accomplish this whether you've got Wi-Fi built into your car you want to tether off your phone you want a dedicated device it's powered when you're driving or maybe tying it into a dedicated battery to also give you power while you're parked so if you're doing this let me know the technique that you guys are using I posted about this on Facebook as I mentioned and turns out a lot of you guys are also running Wi-Fi hotspots in your car and there's many many different ways of doing it so I'm curious to hear from you guys which techniques you're going which routes you're going and what tools you're actually using to accomplish this it's funny I've mentioned that I've been doing this in some previous videos and it's incredible how many people were like vortex if you posted the video yet when are you gonna explain how you you know actually create a Wi-Fi connection in your car and so now that I'm back from vacation one of the first videos that I wanted to do was actually just explaining how this works again there's a variety of different ways of doing it the way that I'm doing it is not the only way but for reasons that I explained in the video this is why I went with this sort of technique and then again I tied it into a dedicated battery pack to give me power not only when I'm driving but because if I want the security-camera stuff in the dash cams while I'm parked I also have it tied in to a dedicated dash cam battery so yeah that's it hopefully that answers the guys questions if you have any additional questions or a curious or whatever just let me know down in the comment area again more information down in the video description as always and yeah that's it for now thanks so much for watching hope you guys are doing well and I'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Vortex Radar

Views: 260,532

Rating: 4.7670002 out of 5

Keywords: radar, detector

Id: BNVFvs4Vx7U

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020