VW mods - Laptop, cell phone, internet and television
Choosing a laptop, cell phone, and internet plan proved to be a daunting task. It
was difficult to sort through the marketing fluff, and figure out which features
were important and which weren't. Furthermore, none of the reviews I found targeted
the lifestyle of living in a van and traveling the country, not to mention that
most were out of date due to the fast paced changes in the industry. In the end,
we found a system that worked well, although I had two complaints. One is the laptop
drained the deep cycle battery in about eight hours, destroying my plan of camping
in the boonies and working on the laptop for days at a time. The other is the lack
of internet access in the boonies. While coverage was excellent in almost every
town and city, as soon as I found I nice spot in the national forest, it petered
out.
I also wanted the ability to watch broadcast television on my laptop. I found a
system that does the job, but it could use some improvements.
Laptop
During late spring and summer of 2003, I gobbled up information on laptops. Prices
ranged from $1000 to over $3000, and features varied widely. I knew that any laptop
was going to take one hell of a beating in the van, so I carefully looked at full
coverage warranties, which typically ran from $200 to $400. The warranties varied
from one manufacturer to the next, and rarely offered full coverage for every type
of damage. Since I was mostly interested in coverage for accidental droppage, that
eliminated most of them.
In August 2003 I needed to make a decision. As luck would have it, emachines (now
owned by Gateway) had just released a new laptop - the M5310. It offered a large
15.4" widescreen display, integrated 802.11g, DVD/CD-RW, firewire, and generous
memory and hard drive space for a little over $1000. I was concerned about emachine's
reputation for reliability, but I reasoned that I could buy a replacement laptop
if necessary and still not spend more than a similarly equipped IBM Thinkpad. And
so I picked one up from a nearby Best Buy, verified there were no dead pixels before
taking it home, and declined their extended warranty.
Now it's several months later, and I'm pretty happy with the purchase. My greatest
fear - that something would go wrong and I'd have to wait six weeks for it to get
fixed - hasn't yet happened. I plug in a USB split keyboard and mouse because I
don't like laptop keyboards and touchpads.
My greatest complaint is with its high power consumption. It has an AMD mobile processor
and burns about 90 watts, which is high by laptop standards, and it drains my 120
amp-hour deep cycle battery in about eight hours. I suspect a well designed Centrino
machine can be twice as efficient. Also, the laptop battery will only run it for
about an hour when fully charged, far less than most other laptops. I think this
may be a defect, but I depend too heavily on it to ship it to emachines for a diagnosis.
Cell phone
The choice of cell phone was driven primarily by the internet service provider -
the company with the best wireless internet plan would be the one we would use.
We found Verizon Wireless had the best nationwide coverage for both voice and internet,
so I chose the cheapest data-capable phone available - the Motorola V120E.
For $40 a month, we get 400 anytime minutes and unlimited minutes on weekends and
after 9 pm weekdays.
Six months after I got it, I'm now on my third phone. The previous two failed and
were replaced under warranty. The first one kept locking up and needed to be power-cycled
to work. The data port on the second one failed. The Verizon guy said that data
port failures were very common on these phones. Luckily, Verizon has been very good
about replacing the phones. I took them to an authorized Verizon store and they
swapped them on the spot, eliminating the need to ship them. They even moved all
contacts to the new phone.
Voice coverage has been excellent, even while crossing Nevada on highway 50. It
doesn't get much better than that.
Internet coverage was a different story, so read on for that one...
Internet
Accessing the internet from anywhere was a critical goal of our trip, as Margaret
and I were dependent on email and the instant information available on the web.
I also needed to remotely administer my web server sitting in a friend's basement
on Long Island, and I wanted to write code on the road, so I wanted to be able to
Google for help.
The most complete nationwide coverage is through satellites, but the equipment is
much too bulky for the van, costs about $5000 for the hardware, and over $100 a
month in access fees. Satellite was just not feasible for us.
The next most complete coverage is through Verizon. The service is still expensive
at $80 a month, but it includes unlimited access. Speeds are a bit faster than a
56k modem, but sometimes inexplicably slower.
We can connect to the internet from almost every town or city, which is good, but
we can rarely connect from the national forest and other remote areas, which is
bad. The remote areas have the best camping spots. I recently spent a day and a
half driving all around Ocala National Forest in Florida trying to find coverage.
It seemed that every time I left the forest, I had coverage within a couple miles,
but as soon as I snuck inside the border, it disappeared. It was maddening.
Let me clarify that getting coverage for voice calls was no problem. The phone switches
to "Extended Area" when it's outside it's own digital network, and calls still fall
under our normal plan rules. Only in rare cases does the phone switch to roaming,
where the calls are $.69 a minute. But accessing the internet required us to be
inside Verizon's digital network.
I bought an external antenna for $40 from Radio Shack to extend the coverage area,
and it has helped a little. It typically adds one, maybe two, bars of service. At
times that can mean the difference between having internet access or not. But don't
expect it to open up the entire national forest - it seems to only add a mile or
so to the coverage area.
When I get connected, it typically works very well and doesn't drop out. I've spent
a few nights transferring huge digital pictures to my web server that take all night,
and the transfer is still going strong when I wake up.
Television
Margaret and I don't watch much television, but I wanted the ability to receive
broadcast stations if we got bored or a national emergency occurred. I hoped to
find a device that would plug into the PCMCIA slot, but the couple I found had terrible
reviews. The device everyone seemed to like the best was
Pinnacle Systems PCTV Deluxe, an external device that plugged into a USB 2.0
port, so that's what I got.
While it usually works, I can't recommend it. For starters, the software is buggy
and often locks up. Their web site has some beta software that supposedly improves
this. Second, it's inconvenient to use since it's a separate piece of hardware that
requires three cables - a 110 volt power source (thus requiring an inverter when
camping), the USB cable, and an antenna or cable wire. All this stuff makes setting
it up in the van a hassle, and in six months of traveling I've only used it once,
just to make sure it worked.
A potential bonus of this system was its ability to capture video. Before we left
our home in August 2003, I spent an afternoon capturing clips of our recent wedding.
Not only did the software mess up the aspect ratio, the resulting mpg files were
unreadable by any video editing software. So much for getting clips of our wedding
on the internet. Hopefully the newer drivers solve this problem, but I'm currently
3000 miles from the source video, and the initial excitement and desire of getting
the wedding clips on the internet has passed.