The Comforts of Home. WiFi and TV

We’ve been living in our RV for just over 3 months. It’s been wonderful, except for the lack of good internet signal and live TV. These are the things that we took for granted in our sticks n’ bricks. It was just part of life. You buy a house, you sign up for cable and internet. (Almost) Every house has it, it’s just a way of life.

As an RV’er, it’s a bit different. Some Campgrounds have cable and Wi-Fi and some do not. As a result, it falls on the sholder’s of the camper to determine their needs and wants and act accordingly.

We moved to the campground with just phone service. Turtle Kraal RV Park has WiFi, but even on a great day the WiFi is limited. The park does not have cable. Since this our summer home we needed to come up with our own solution to the “no internet / no TV’ delimna.

We started with a T-Moble hot spot. It was $99 for the box and the $50 per month for the service. We also purchased RoKu a box that connects to the TV so you can stream channels. (Peacock, Netflix, Hulu, etc..) The Roku box was $29.00 at Walmart.

This combination was just OK. There were days when the T-Mobile hot spot box would work so that I could do some internet work, but the signal wasn’t strong enough for the TV. Then the opposite would happen. For me this was somewhat stressful as I was never sure what I would be able to get done. I didn’t like that at all.

Then StarLink Arrived!

Set-up for this was pretty easy. We set the dish outside of the RV, fed the cable through the corner of one of the slides, plugged it into the box and Voila…Internet!

Ok. So not quite that easy. There was an app we had to downloaded to get the unit up and running. We also had to do some trouble shooting.

Our issue: Our Starlink remained “offline”. We unplugged, rebooted, made sure wires weren’t kinked or twisted and waited 12 hours for something to happen. After no success we searched online for other suggestions and were instructed to make sure the cable into the dish was secure. (It is attached to the cable but can loosen during shipping.) Amazing enough this was the issue and now we are all set. (Happy Dance Here!!)

I tell you this story because I feel like I have been liberated. I can finally work on this blog whenever I feel like it and not crawl through my tasks at a snail’s pace due to low speeds.

While Starlink is a bit pricey ($649.00 for the hardware and $135.00 monthly) I am satisfied with the result. We have fast internet, we can stream TV, and this winter while we are in Florida, I will be able to pick up a work-at-home accounting gig without worrying about my access to the World Wide Web.