You know I love wifi, but often getting reliable service is tricky. Campgrounds will say they have wifi, but it is usually weak or the quality of your signal varies depending on how far you are from the source.
When making reservations and asking about the quality of the wifi we have heard, more than once, "Well, you know, it's campground wifi."
This is rather frustrating and with more and more people living and working on the road, you'd think that campgrounds would get with the program, but since they seem to continue filling their sites, apparently they don't care too much.
Enter the Wifi Ranger
This is the second post about "Wise Buys". The first one was about a motion sensing light for about $12, the Wifi Ranger costs significantly more, about $600, but has been well worth it.
I'm not super tech-savvy so I might not describe this accurately, but I'll describe it in a way that makes sense to me. The Wifi Ranger attaches to the TV antenna on the roof of the RV (that was exciting) and picks up wifi signals in about a 1/2 to one mile radius (possibly further) and strengthens the signals it connects to.
Now, it's not like a magic wifi provider, you still need the password on a password protected network or you can use open networks like you might find at a fast food restaurant.
Once connected to a wifi source, the ranger then provides wifi to our devices. The ranger is password protected, so it creates our own wifi system with an extra layer of security vs. logging into a public wifi source.
It takes weak campground wifi and boosts it so we can stream and have a steady source of wifi instead of having it go in and out...which is very frustrating.
All of our devices automatically connect to the ranger, so we don't have to log in to each new network as we move around.
The cost of the ranger made us think long and hard about buying it, but since we kept going over on our phone data plan due to weak wifi, we decided to give it a try. It has been well worth it for us.
