Replies to post #4097 on Mickey's Telecom Corner

[bulldzr]

Good advice, the voice of experience from an old, pre 3G, wi-lan signal thief, right? ;>)

Lets see... driving through a neighborhood in your rental car, preferably a nicer neighborhood, trying to look inconspicuous, with your 802.11 antenna on the dash and your laptop on the seat... searching for a signal...

I use to just go to a La Quinta and sit in the parking lot, but then they started adding network security and passwords, etc. No fun.

Just a little "On Topic" Telecom history...

[postyle]

Think about moving the router itself (with the 4G USB modem/antenna) to a window, preferably a window facing towards the "tower".

Yep, moving to the window was the key for me. Since I did that, I have continuous "4G" at home except on days when the weather is bad.

I should mention there are two issues I had to figure out the hard way:

1) when the modem lost the 4G connection (blue light) and reverted to 3G (green light), the only way to get the 4G back was to power the router off/on or remove the modem and plug it back in.

2) Like many routers, the cradlepoint defaults to an HTML login screen that you will want to disable from the control panel. For most devices (laptop, ipod, ipad, etc) this login screen is merely a nuisance, creating an extra step every time you establish a connection. But for some devices (like the Nintendo Wii) it will prohibit you from being able to connect altogether.