Ok, so I know the purists will be up me for wanting internet access whilst camping but I do and thought some of you may also be keen to see how I've done it.
The quest began last September when I returned to Teewah after years off the beach, last time I was here I didn't have a mobile let alone an iPad so I didn't miss my constant high speed connection, but oh how things have changed, now I need my evening fix, but as many of you will know the mobile network doesn't quite make it to Teewah and you can pretty much count on no reception in the camping zone (other than the odd clear night) on your phones and after seeing that Firefox had a stable connection using an external antenna atop is Taj Mahal on wheels I knew it could be done.
Ok, so I decided we needed an external antenna and a modem with the appropriate input. I checked all the USB modems I had laying around including a Telstra 4G USB card (Sierra 320u) that I thought would work great plugged into a Draytek router but the Draytek had throughput issues so I swapped it out for a little Dovado Tiny unit which was made specifically for the job and did it beautifully (about $120 from telco antennas plus $20-30 for the 12v adapter) For the antenna I did a bit of research and decided somewhere around 6.5db was a good compromise for the purpose and found RFI make a unit called a COL2195 which Telstra actually resell and gives 6.5db on 3g and 3db on 4g (I found one unused on Gumtree for $40 but I think about $150 new also from Telco). Note, you'll need a pig tail adapter to connect antenna to modem.
The antenna came with about 6m of cable and I didn't want to permanently attach it so using some hose clamps I attached it to the end of an extendable aluminium paint roller handle ($20 bucks from bunnings) that I simply zip tie to one of the poles for the bed flies. I run the cable up under the bed end into the camper terminating in the modem.
The end result is it works great, in fact I'm writing this whilst sitting on the beach at Teewah (it's bloody cold so I'm sitting on the couch in the Hawk). Without the aerial we get no reception, with the aerial we get Telstra 4G with 48% signal strength which gives us download speeds of 10mbps and uploads around 1mbps. This is fantastic speed for surfing the net and we also use it to make VoIP calls using a SIP client on our mobiles, also the wireless N lets you take your iPad out to the fire (let the abuse begin).
Here's some pics I took yesterday of it up and running.
