Still working on my internet mess. Ubiquiti Unifi stuff near ready to deploy but not going to until I get a solid signal. My 4 yo Mofi apparently won稚 configure for the APN 4GAS wants me to use, but if I stay on the AT&T Broadband APN I知 very likely to get Throttled after 22gb and that stays until end of the cycle. If I get throttled and switch APN痴 I apparently stay throttled. So biting the bullet for new modem and antenna. There is also the possibility to switch to Verizon, but that entails reorientation of antenna about 90ｰ of course that would require a change plan, at price increase naturally. A neighbor visited this morning and she got 4 bars on her Verizon iphone standing outside at corner of house. Verizon tower is only about 1/2 mile away, about 200 ft higher up the mountain, but I have some trees between us.
Oh how I feel your pain, David! Not sure what the acronyms you're using mean, but in my experience, just because your phone gets plenty of bars doesn't mean you'll actually be able to place calls or surf the net. I have Verizon service, a 4G phone, and can't reliably make calls with four bars. When I talk to Verizon, and I do this every year, and ask if there's anything that I or they can do to improve the signal, all I get is "we're sorry". So I tried Sprint/T-Mobile, and while the signal was better, it wasn't reliable. Makes sense, because their antennas are on the same tower that Verizon uses. And that tower is six miles away, and the canyon top is in the way of line-of-sight. Near as I can tell from your photos, though, if you can see the tower from where you can put the yagi antenna, and it's only a half mile away, you should get a nice strong signal. If I had that situation here, I'd be on it like a rooster on a June bug! But I'd also make sure there was a free trial, full refund clause to anything I agreed to. There was supposed to be one for the above mentioned trial, but I've yet to receive a refund for the first month of service.
But that's only half the battle. The other half is getting enough data. The popular thing for the cellular providers is to tell you is that if you go over your data cap, they won't charge you for more data. But if you read the fine print, you'll find words to the effect that if you use more than some vaguely defined amount of data, they will slow your connection down to old time land line modem speeds. This applies even to the so called "unlimited" plans that each of the big three offer, and it applies to every MVNO reseller of those big three services. Those resellers will tell you that they'll never throttle your connection, but what they don't tell you is that the big three, from whom the resellers are buying that cellular service, all retain the right to throttle speed if they determine, by that same mystical number, that you are abusive in the amount of data that you consume.. But I've never been able to put my finger on just what that number is.
Someone here suggested signing up for two accounts, installing two cellular modems, and just switching between them as that magic number of bytes was used up. Maybe you can do the same thing by purchasing two sim cards, and just swapping out the cards. Rig it so the billing periods ended by a two week difference, and you'd probably be covered. Wouldn't be cheap. My satellite service costs me a hundred a month for 100Gb of data, but it's so slow there's no way I'll ever be able to use that much data. If there was, I'd consider it a good deal, and in truth, I'd pay twice that to get that amount of data if it was reliable and fast.
So where does that leave you? If you can put your yagi in the same place from which you can see the tower, and you can either get two accounts, or you can get service from two different providers that have antennas on that tower, maybe that'll work for you. But I don't know of any way of telling for sure without actually trying it. Just be sure there's a free trial period, and be ready to keep after 'em when they try to screw you out of the first month's fee if it doesn't work.
ullinghair::2cents:
BTW, if you follow Eric's advise and become a midnight lumberjack, I recommend one of Popgadget's ChaChing Makita
electric chainsaws...:laughing:
