Our Camper Internet Configuration

Posted in Technology on October 2, 2013 Last Updated on November 20, 2013

Living in a mobile residence can complicate lots of situations, one of those being the fact that you cannot simply run a residential internet connection to your RV and pull it around the country. Our livelihood comes from the internet, and we cannot go without a connection for more than a day or two without having potential customer service issues. There are countless ways to solve internet needs and we are hoping to make sure we cover a large array of them and keep our internet flowing, while spending the least amount of funds.

Without further ado, we bring you…

Our Current Internet Configuration

Most campgrounds and friends/family will have a wireless router. The problem, however, is the signal is often not strong enough to make it in to our camper and allow us to have a reliable connection. To solve this, we use a NanoStation M2 (a Wireless to WAN device), which connects to their wireless network, or any open Wifi network up to a few miles away, and passes the internet in to our Linksys router inside the camper by way of a standard CAT 5 network cable. The NanoStation provides a web interface, which you log in to just as you would any home router, choose the network you would like to connect to, enter the Network’s access key/password, and save the information.

The NanoStation can also serve as a router and the Linksys is not a requirement. We chose to use it to provide more flexibility, allowing us to connect and test any network toys we like to its’ WAN port, without needing to make internal network configuration changes.

Should wireless be an issue, or the house is close, we also have a 100ft CAT 5 Network Cable to connect our Linksys Router directly to their router. Switching is as simple as unplugging the NanoStation network cable from the Linksys, plugging in the network cable from the house, and renewing the DHCP settings in the Linksys router’s admin.

That’s really all there is to it. Once the Internet is in the RV and connected to the router, configuration is like that of any other home network. We connect our devices via Wireless to the Linksys router, and away we go on the internet.

And, for those of you who are working with this setup, we bring you:

The Configurations

Please note, while these settings work and work for us, there may be some which work better for you and your needs. We also always welcome comments and suggestions for tweaks to the setup and are more than happy to give credit for those we use.

NanoStation

Our Nanostation is not configured much differently than the standard instructions state. With our setup however, and at the recommendation of others, there are a few changes that have been made. Below are screenshots of each of our modified configuration screens.

Things to Note

Our NanoStation has an IP address of 192.168.10.1 This is different than our internal network, which is 192.168.1.[1-255]. This is all part of my segregation of the various networks. Which leads to…

The NanoStation is plugged in to WAN port on our Linksys router. The reason for this, is our in-camper computers connect to it, and never care what internet method is plugged in to the WAN port.

On the advanced tab, we have set the Distance to not use the Automatic setting, and lowered the distance to 0.1 This was advised by another RV’er on Facebook, and should give us a more stable signal.

The Linksys Router

Things to Note

The Linksys router is on a different subnet. I was having various frustrations making everything communicate, and this change help resolve it.