Apr 15 2013

Mobile Internet, part II

OK. I’m sitting here looking at my fingers as I type. I see three small cuts (nicks from sharp aluminum edges), three broken nails, and one knuckle scuff. I have been fighting the mobile Internet installation, and finally won.

When I started on the project Saturday I figured it was a two or three hour job: pull out all the old gear, run a new antenna cable, mount the new antenna, and then install the new gear. No big deal. But every step of the way, I was tested. This was an exercise in beating frustration, which is part of why it took two and a half days to complete.

Nothing would go right the first time. Now, I can admit that some of the trouble was the result of my inexperience with some things, but I’m not a total noob, so there’s a piece I can attribute to some other force: bad karma, juju, luck, biorhythyms, alien influence, whatever. Nothing was as easy as it was supposed to be, and when I realized how things were going to be, I decided I would stick it out even if it took all week.

The big problem was the antenna. The old antenna was something called an NMO Mount, which means that the installer made a 3/4″ hole in the Airstream’s roof that I would have to plug. The new antenna requires a side mount (it was designed for buildings rather than RVs) and so I had a very limited range of places I could put it, unless I wanted to fabricate a custom aluminum bracket. I very nearly did, but then found that the bracket upon which the TV antenna rests made a perfect mount.

[NOTE added 5/14/2013: I’m an idiot. I should have just returned this antenna and done some more looking. Since I went through this nightmare install, I discovered a replacement that would have just screwed right onto the existing NMO mount, avoiding the need to run a new antenna cable and seal up the old hole. I recommend this antenna to anyone who wants the same 4G performance but with a much lower profile: Laird Phantom.]

Airstream antenna This location was ideal: away from metal objects on the roof that might block the signal (such as the solar panel and air conditioner), low enough that the antenna will clear the carport entryway, and right where I can easily inspect it. I had to run the coaxial antenna cable through the base mounts that hold up the front solar panel. That was actually one of the easy problems, solved with the purchase of a 1/2″ drill bit and two rubber grommets.

The simplest path to the electronics cabinet was through the existing 3/4″hole in the roof. I thought I was being clever to use the old antenna wire to pull through the new one, but the old line kept snagging. So I used the old antenna wire to pull through a few feet of slick & smooth plastic vacuum line (left over from the Mercedes 300D renovation), and then used that to pull the new antenna line through–and discovered that the new one wouldn’t quite fit through an internal brace inside the Airstream’s ceiling.

I tried everything to get that wire through, wiggling it, greasing it, pushing it and pulling it, but it just wouldn’t go. I even drilled little holes behind the overhead cabinet to try to locate the problem. By the time I had exhausted every possible approach, the entire overhead cabinet and doors were completely removed along with one of the ceiling mounted JVC speakers, the curtains, one power outlet, a 12 volt outlet, the coaxial cable outlet, part of the white vinyl wall covering, and (just for good measure) the obsolete DVD changer. With the tools burying the dinette table and bits of fiberglass insulation, sawdust, and aluminum shavings everywhere, the Airstream looked like it was still on the assembly line.

In the end, there was nothing to do about it. The new antenna cable was just too large to fit through that hidden constriction. After sleeping on it, and consideration of the idea of relocating the entire electronics cabinet, there was really only one practical solution left. We drilled a fresh hole in the ceiling and ran the wire down the ceiling about four inches to a point where it could disappear again. A plastic wire chase helps minimize the visual impact.

There were many more challenges, but I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say that nothing could be taken for granted. Every splice was suspect, every hole was in the wrong place, every trick I tried was confounded, and in the end the job took about eight hours, not counting three stops at the hardware store.

But finally, it works. The picture shows the install. It’s a little cluttered looking in the photo. In reality we have more useful space in the closet than we had before, because I neatened up a lot of the DC wiring and tied up the excess. That little plastic bag at the bottom contains a 12vDC + wire that is leftover from two installations ago and is still hot. I’m keeping it in case I need more power in this cabinet later.

I’m in the Airstream now, using the new wireless Internet system to write this blog. The reception is fantastic even in the brick carport (router reports -53 dBm). I can’t wait to try it out in a remote place during our next trip east.

Since I started this project, I noticed that Kyle and Kevin both went with similar equipment. Since Kevin is an engineer/publisher who must get online daily when he’s traveling, and Kyle is a full-timer who does Internet consulting, I figure we are in good company. The transition to 4G technology is raising a lot of questions for people, so I may do a seminar at Alumafandango (Oregon, Aug 6-10) on that subject. (By the way, if you’re planning to come to Alumafandango, now’s the time to register. Spaces are filling up quickly!)

Apr 13 2013

Updating the Airstream’s wireless Internet

As soon as we got back from our trip I started ordering things for the coming Airstream maintenance and upgrades. So beginning on Friday, interesting boxes have been arriving at our doorstop. Many more are due this coming week.

The first package contained a new cabin air filter for the GL320. That dust storm really got into everything, and so I decided I’d change the cabin air filters and check the engine air filters. They were all better than I expected but the cabin air filter was definitely due because it wasn’t changed at the last service.

Today’s package contained my new wireless Internet kit. As I mentioned, our Cradlepoint CTR500 has been obsoleted by the manufacturer and isn’t reliable with the new 4G networks, and the roof antenna on the Airstream goes back to the 2G days (and isn’t compatible with the frequencies Verizon uses today for 4G LTE, which are in the 700 MHz band). Plus, I got tired of not being able to get online in fringe areas, especially when everyone else seemed to be getting along fine. Turns out they are all using “boosters,” and so I finally broke down and got one, along with everything else.

Airstream wireless Internet I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with Vanessa from the 3G Store to work through the technology needs and make sure everything I was going to order would be compatible. I already had the core of the system, a Verizon wireless data card capable of using the new 4G LTE network (specifically, a Pantech UML-290). The bottom line for everything else was about $360, including:

Cradlepoint MBR-95 wireless router. This is the device that takes the signal from the Pantech UML-290 and makes a private wireless hotspot that all our devices can use.
Wilson Sleek 4G-V signal booster cradle (thanks to Jay & Cherie for the tip). This amplifies the signal from any device you put into the cradle, 3G or 4G. It’s really designed for car use but will work fine for our purposes. The Pantech will get strapped into the cradle with a rubber band.
SureCall omnidirectional fiberglass antenna with ten feet of low-loss cable, and an adapter to connect to the Sleek. This antenna is a bit of a monster, 9.5 inches tall and about 3.5 inches wide at the base. It’s much larger than the antenna it is replacing (which was the size of a shot glass) but hopefully offers better performance too. The specs call for a 2-3 dB gain.

All of this stuff will get wired up in the cabinet that we have reserved for electronics and DVDs, near the TV set. I’ve already got a 12v connector that fits the Cradlepoint, leftover from a previous installation, and a 12 volt socket which will take the cigarette lighter adapter for the Sleek, so we’re all set for power.

The antenna will be mounted to the side of an aluminum leg of one of the solar panels. Clearance is a challenge: I bought this 9.5″ antenna because the Wilson RV antenna that most people use is 18 inches tall and won’t clear the entryway of our carport. This one will just barely make it. It will be interesting to watch as it comes out of the carport the first time. If I’ve miscalculated, we might lose a Spanish tile or two in the process.

Before going to all the trouble of running the new antenna wire and putting mounting screws in place, I hooked up the full kit in the house, and dropped the antenna out the window. After the usual firmware upgrade and some configuration, the first test, using only the Pantech without the Sleek booster, yielded a good signal of -69 dBm, which is not surprising since we are in a city. Then I put the Pantech card into the Sleek cradle, which boosted the signal and sent it out to the external antenna, and as I watched the signal improve to -43 dBm. That’s a really good increase, and better than what Wilson promised for the Sleek booster with its standard antenna.

The actual installation will be in the next few days. I’m looking locally for the appropriate polyurethane caulk (Sikaflex 221, Vulkem/TremPro 635, or similar) to seal up the antenna wire where it passes through the aluminum, and so far am striking out. I can order an $8 tube of it with $10 shipping from many places, but that’s annoying so I’m trying to find an acceptable substitute in Tucson. I suppose I can always go over to the local RV store and get something that will work, but in the past the “white box” caulks they tend to sell have been disappointing. They just don’t last, and I’d rather not have to get up on the roof next year to do this job again.

The real test of this new gear will be this summer when the Airstream is in Vermont. Reception at our parking spot has always been marginal, to the point that I have to borrow a friend’s office to get work done efficiently. It would be nice to be able to work from the Airstream as I’m accustomed to doing. And when we are traveling, it looks like the addition of the big antenna and booster will help me get online in more places, and I’m all for that.

Apr 11 2013

Airstream LED lights and European tow vehicles

Since we’re back at home base for a while, I’m going to be posting mostly about Airstream maintenance stuff. Those of you who are looking for pretty pictures and stories about the family might want to avert your eyes for a while.

Several times a year I get inquiries from new Airstream owners who have European tow vehicles (mostly Mercedes, but also BMW, VW, Audi, Porsche, etc) and are having trouble getting straight information about hitching the two vehicles up properly. I can’t cover the entire topic because it’s quite complicated but I’d like to cover at least one common problem.

The Europeans have been using clever computers in their cars, which measure the resistance of the trailer lights to determine if there is a trailer attached. If there’s no trailer, the computer turns off the 7-way plug. I don’t know why this matters, since American tow vehicles leave the plug constantly powered and it doesn’t seem to cause problems. It may be a case of being just a little too clever, because this resistance-sensing scheme is baffled by trailers that have LED tail lights, as all new Airstreams do.

So imagine the happy new Airstream owner with a fancy BMW/Mercedes/whatever to pull it, and you’d think he’d be on Cloud Nine but when he goes to hitch up, the brake lights don’t come on and (on some vehicles, like Mercedes) the brake controller has no power. The darned computer has turned off the power because it thinks there is no trailer. All that money spent on a nice car and a nice trailer, and yet it’s stuck in the driveway with no lights.

LED lights on trailers are nothing new, so you’d think that the European vehicle manufacturers might have figured this one out by now. Indeed Volkswagen has. They sell a special patch cable that contains a resistor, which you can buy (if you search carefully on the Internet or have the part number at the dealer) for about $40. This works, and it’s stupid.

It’s stupid because the resistance cable adds in a couple feet of length, so the cord is now too long and must be secured in some kludgy way. Secure it incorrectly and one day you’ll find it dragging down the road. And the patch cable is stupid because it adds another point of connection, and the connectors on 7-way cables are famous for corroding in the weather, so you’ve just lowered the reliability of your lights and brakes.

Andy Thomson at Can-Am RV helped me out with this one when we bought our Mercedes GL320 in 2009, and I’ve passed on the knowledge many times since then. His solution is the best one, I think: just wire in some incandescent lights into the system. (You could use resistors but light bulbs are easy to mount, and easy to find and replace on the road if needed.) Andy uses the clearance lights that were found on older Airstreams, because they have two bulbs. If one goes, there is some redundancy and you can swap a bulb from another light for a while.

The photo above is from our trailer. We just mounted the clearance lights right on the floor in Eleanor’s closet, with all the other main 12-volt junctions. This is normally covered with a box so you can’t see it. Because the lights are kept out of the weather, they should last a long time. We’ve been using this system for about four years.

LED Lighting Fix This solution is really easy for the DIY’er to install. You just wire the lights into the relevant circuits. The easiest place to do this is in the “rats nest” of wiring where the 7-way connector enters the trailer. This is usually in the front closet or under the front sofa, or behind an access panel in the front storage compartment, on the street side of the trailer. (The diagram above is by Andy Thomson of Can-Am RV.)

Once you’ve made this simple modification, your Airstream lights and brakes should work with any tow vehicle. If you ever have a problem on the road, check the 7-way connector for corrosion first, because the LED lights and this modification should be highly reliable.

Mar 24 2013

Last-minute cabinet

It’s Sunday night and our prep time has run out …

We’ve had a great week with our courtesy parkers Kyle & Mary & Kathryn. Now we are entering the second planned phase of our time together. Kyle & Mary hitched up the 34-footer and left early this morning for Anza-Borrego, and we are due to follow them on Monday.

They left behind a souvenir: daughter Kathryn. She and Emma are virtually inseparable so we opted to keep Kathryn here for an overnight and let the two girls travel together in our car tomorrow. Having two of them hasn’t been much harder than having one, probably because they are keeping each other entertained, and so Eleanor and I have had time today to get serious about prepping the Airstream for travel.

My projects aren’t done but the trailer is good enough. Kyle pitched in this week to help with building the new furniture, which was the last major project. By Wednesday I could see I wasn’t going to have time to complete it, but with Kyle’s help we at least had the first unit of three installed by Saturday. This first piece includes the laundry bin and shoe cubby.

It took a while because we were working with salvaged pieces of lightweight plywood from the previous cabinet. This stuff is great, much lighter than ordinary plywood, and already laminated with the correct wood grain pattern that matches the rest of the trailer, so it was too good to just toss out. The black melamine plywood I had purchased earlier was too prone to chipping at the edges when cut, and even the black melamine edge banding was chipping when trimmed. It was never going to look good, so I abandoned the melamine plywood and came up with a scheme to use the lightweight Airstream plywood with solid aluminum strips as edge banding. A two-part epoxy turned out to be the best adhesive.

Aluminum trimmed edges

Each piece had to be inspected, oriented so that prior holes and damage would be hidden, cut to size and length, then glued up with aluminum strips. Then we sanded the aluminum clean of blotches and sprayed clearcoat on it. The results were great but it took too long for a project that I had intended to complete before we hit the road.

I kept the fold-out credenza as the centerpiece of the new furniture, and built around it. The salvaged strips became facia, trim, and legs. I used the black melamine plywood for interior shelves, since the chipped edges don’t show once everything is trimmed out.

Temporary install What you see in the picture is only about 1/3 of the final piece. To the right (rearward trailer-wise) of the laundry cabinet/credenza we’ll have a microwave cabinet, and further right we’ll have a recycling bin, plus some misc other storage. I’ll have to finish it later in April when we get back.

The picture shows a temporary top made out of a scrap of MDF and quickly sprayed with polyurethane. The actual permanent countertop will be continuous all the way down the length of the trailer to the bulkhead you see in the background. This will be about six feet by 18 inches. We haven’t decided what we’re going to make it from, but I’ve got a few ideas.

The balance of the weekend has been spent re-packing the Airstream. It’s 7 p.m. and we’re still not quite done packing but it will be done tonight with a few last-minute things to be done in the morning. The next two weeks or so will be on the road, so I’ll try to blog at least every other day as we go.

Mar 17 2013

Safari so good

We’re still working on the Safari and I’m watching the calendar now. We’ve got about a week before it’s time to head out for the next trip, and in that time we need at least five days to clean and re-pack the trailer. That may seem like a lot of prep time, but it’s always complicated when you travel as a family, with a chef, and with an office. If we were childless, ate out for most meals, and didn’t have a business, packing would be much simpler but our travel would probably be less interesting too.

Having about a week to go means I need to get the projects wrapped up or at least in a condition where Eleanor can work around me. Right now the Safari is cluttered with tools and supplies, and there are still small items to be resolved. These “little things” always take more time than they should, it seems.

Furnace chase

For example, on Thursday we reinstalled the furnace chase that runs between the dinette benches. This is just two pieces of plywood stapled together to form an “L” that covers up the furnace ducts. The problem with this job was that Airstream originally nailed the chase to the floor and to the wall, then stapled the wood together. When we removed it, we had to pull the nails and I couldn’t re-nail it without also pulling the staples (and potentially ruining the piece). So the best fix was to cut new wood braces (one of which you can see in the photo above) and screw them to the floor.

I found a scrap of Douglas Fir and cut two pieces to be the braces, then drilled holes, then screwed them into place. Then we screwed the chase to the wood braces with #8 screws and finish washers. Now, if we ever need to get in here again, we can remove the chase in less than a minute.

This isn’t a hard job, but in the end the whole thing took about 30 minutes, and it was just one of many “little things” that the Safari will need before it’s ready to hit the road again.

Another little job was to make the new entry door threshold from Black Walnut, to match the new floor. I cut and shaped it on Friday, and sanded and finished it with several coats of polyurethane on Saturday. Because the floor wasn’t even across the threshold, it took about six or seven test-fittings and careful sanding (first with 100 grit, then with 220 grit) to get it to be an exact fit. This project probably consumed another hour or so, but I think the end result was worth it. In the images below you can see the original oak threshold and then the new walnut one.

The white wall covering in the Safari is looking pretty ratty. It’s a fabric that approximates the fuzzy side of hook-and-loop fastener, and in fact Velcro will stick to it very well. This stuff gets black marks from any kind of aluminum abrasion (such as screws or rivets moving on the wall during travel) and that black stuff is aluminum oxide. It’s extremely hard to clean. The white fabric also picks up dust, stains, and lots of other things, so the long term result is that it looks terrible. The only effective way we’ve found to clean it is to use a product called Dealersol, which you can’t buy at retail. This is sort of like dry-cleaning liquid: it mysteriously picks up horrible stains and they evaporate in a cloud of unhealthy Volatile Organic Compounds. It smells for a few days and probably causes a dozen fatal diseases in lab rats, but it does work really well.

Since we can no longer obtain Dealersol or anything like it, we tried a simple Rug Doctor with the usual cleaning solution, and it had no impact at all on the stains. So at this point we are stymied. The white fuzz can’t be removed because it is strongly adhered to the aluminum interior skin. Even if peeled off, a significant adhesive residue remains on the aluminum. I’ve tried cleaning the adhesive off, but it takes other nasty chemicals and the walls never look good even after many hours of effort. So it seems our walls will continue to show their years of use, until the day comes that we are going to gut the trailer and replace the interior aluminum wholesale.

(Believe it or not, I’ve done that before. Long-time Airstream Life readers may remember Project Vintage Thunder, in which Brett & I gutted and refurbished a 1977 Argosy 24 including removing most of the interior skins and replacing them with shiny new aluminum. The results are very nice, but it’s definitely not a weekend job.)

Setting that problem aside, I decided to push forward with the new cabinetry project. For several years we have had a combination laundry/microwave cart that we rigged up with an off-the-shelf chrome wire rack and a sheet of white Melamine plywood. It has worked but we could do better. I’ve had thoughts of building something more permanent and more functional. We’d like to have a bigger space for collecting recycling, a bigger and more secure spot for a microwave oven, and more space for shoes by the door.

The recycling requirement might strike you as odd, but we recycle extensively at home (about 75% of our household waste is recyclable thanks to a really excellent program in Tucson) and we hate to toss out glass, paper, and plastic when we are traveling. The problem when traveling is that it can be a long time between recycling opportunities, because most campgrounds don’t offer recycling. (This is a travesty in my opinion. RV’ers already have the reputation of being resource hogs. Here’s a great opportunity for the industry to improve its image and they ignore it.)

So the new cabinet design I’m working on will allow convenient and roomy space for those things we have that Airstream didn’t build into the trailer in 2005. The end result will be fairly simple, just some shelves and a top, but it will be a big improvement for us and it will be an interesting challenge for me. On Saturday I went out to get supplies for this project, and Eleanor and I removed all the furniture on the curbside of the trailer including the interior wheel well cover, and then I did some measuring and thinking about how it should all go back together. More on that later this week.

Today we are expecting courtesy parkers to arrive, our friends Kyle, Mary, and Kathryn. I expect some upheaval, as Kathryn and Emma are deeply bonded by common interests and attitudes of 12-year-olds, and of course we’ll want to do what we can with Kyle & Mary while they are here. Still, I’ve got to work on this cabinet project every day if there’s any chance of getting it installed in time for the upcoming trip to California. It should be an interesting week.