Personal WiFi & Van CCTV

How often do you go away only to find very poor WiFi availability on site? I decided to create the best setup that I could for around £200.

Firstly I bought a 300meg router that simply required a sim card to be inserted and got ourselves on a £7 a month contract giving 3gb of data. Plenty for receiving emails and exploring local attractions before setting off to find them.

The router plugs directly into the 12v circuit, in our case simply through the cigarette style socket. Although the signal was pretty good I added a 4G arial that I mounted on a pole. I made the pole out of standard 40mm plastic plumbing pipe, capped off both ends and mounted the arial with the two cables running through it. The two cables simply screw to the back of the router and presto .. 5 bars pretty much all of the time, even when our mobiles have no bars at all.

Then the first surprise was to find an RJ11 socket on the back of the router where we plugged in a standard landline phone. This instantly worked brilliantly. It's obviously not a landline but simply utilises the Sim card in the router. So now our family can pretty much always reach us even when our phones have no signal at all.

On another trip we wanted to take our granddaughter to the kids disco in the clubhouse but we have a dog. We've never left the dog in the caravan but thought it should be fine for half an hour and he'd had a long walk anyway. So to test out how he would be I attached a CCTV recorder box to the router and a single camera clipped to a high cupboard.

We then went off to the club where we could have a drink and call up the camera on the mobile phone. Worked brilliantly .... but.

No sooner had we got out of the caravan that Barney (the dog) jumped straight up and sat at the dinette looking out of the window and barking at anything that moved. So we gave up on that but how useful to be able to dial into your caravan to make sure all is well. You leave your van and could even set the cameras to detect movement where you then receive an email and would then obviously dial straight in to see what's happening.

Personally, I am really chuffed with the whole setup so thought I'd share it.