Category: Commentary

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Out of the COLD!

We made it from Illinois to Arizona without too much trouble.  Covid finally caught up to us on the way.  We managed to quarantine in a park (turning one night into 7).  Now several weeks later, we are all three still “getting over it”.  Minor symptoms persisted for weeks..  We spent a couple of weeks in Phoenix at a Thousand Trails Encore, then we scheduled two weeks at an Arizona State park.

All was well.  We had reservations for the end of December in Yuma (still do).  But we tried to make alternate reservations between a couple of AZ state parks.  My daughter who is camping next to us, has three vehicles.  They are in the process of trying to move to a 5th wheel and obtained a pickup truck which they need to bring along with their class A and a small car.  When we came to this park, the ranger said – no problem, you are all the same family, correct?  But when we tried to make another reservation – it was “$15 a day for the third vehicle, no exceptions!”  So, an additional $210 per week to park a third, unused, vehicle in the same site as the other two.  This is at an electric only site at a park with dump station, but NO WATER for filling tanks.  Sad Arizona.  Really Sad.  I understand there is a bit of an issue with people coming in with one RV and multiple cars and families all packing into a single site but rangers ARE ALLOWED to be reasonable.  Rangers are allowed to count heads and charge extra. When they choose not to be, they drive people away.  Drive reasonable people away.  And we drove away and it will be cold day in hell the next time we visit an Arizona state park.

So, we dropped the state park plan and are moving on early to the next TT Encore Park.  Meanwhile, we are taking it easy, trying to get back to 100% health.  Enjoying the warmer weather and sunsets.  

Crazies on the Mountain

Back home….. My mother found out we had covid via Facebook. That generated one “how are you” query via a text message.  That’s it.  Nothing more.  I could be dead, and my mother might have to find out about it via Facebook.  Some family.  Meanwhile, the weekly family zoom meetings have mysteriously stopped.  Not that most of the family would stoop low enough to actually participate.  There were lots of lame excuses, but the real reasons were all political and all excuses to avoid acting like we were a family.  

Dozens of questions remain unanswered about the homestead.  Family updates are few and very far between AND never complete.  That’s more than enough of that.

San Diego!

We all made a side trip to the San Diego Zoo with a short stop at the beach and Pacific Ocean. The zoo was a little disappointing with all the empty cages, but that’s what you get when you visit on the cusp of winter on a cool day. We stayed to see the light show which was made more interesting by a very visible meteorite blazing across the sky at the start.

I have been making progress in the astrophotography.  Deb bought me a nice scope a while back, but learning how to use it, and getting the right software all configured is a bit of work.  Add to that the necessity of clear nights that aren’t too cold.  But Janessa (a granddaughter) and I are working through it.  At least in the southwest, the skies in general, are darker and clearer.   Unfortunately, around Yuma they are terrible.  Short evening sessions under pressure to make things work aren’t conducive to achieving the best results, but we have made progress.  We made a nice mosaic of the moon last night.  Christmas went well, if very busy as usual.  In a few days, we head back toward Tuscon, in the rain.

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Pepwave – dark waters solved.

Mixed in with all our other troubles with Rover’s engine, our Pepwave Max Transit Duo went offline.  Nothing seemed to help.  It refused to acknowledge the AT&T SIM.  It has four SIM ports and none of them would show the SIM “present”.  I went to AT&T and got a new SIM.  No change.  I went through various reboots and full power cycles – no change.  The router still functioned – it could pass Starlink and even pass the personal hotspot from my phone. 

I tried a factory reset.  That’s supposed to reset everything, right?  Well, it turns out it doesn’t.  With some devices, when you factory reset, it reloads the original factory firmware stored in some ROM.  I can understand why you might not want to do that – old broken code, etc.  

The Pep stores TWO versions of firmware.  Mine had 8.2.0 and 8.2.1 and was running the latter.  

The Pep stopped working when Rover was sitting in Ford’s parking lot – with too much electrical load running in the RV and skies were cloudy and of course, it’s fall so we get less sun into the panels.  The lithium’s dropped charge and voltage until the inverter shut off and somewhere along there, the Pep shut down too.  It is powered directly off the battery feed so it continued to run until the battery voltage got below whatever the modem’s limit was.  As crazy as things were, I didn’t track exactly when it all quit.

Service – NOT

Pepwave was contacted – no help.  They declared the router: Broken.  They also reminded me that I didn’t re-up on the $200/year warranty so – tough luck!  They have no repair service.  Even if you have a warranty claim, then just swap routers.  Of course, someone takes these broken routers and tries to fix them and put them back onto the warranty swap train – but nope, if you didn’t pay their annual warranty tribute, you are supposed to just go buy another one.  I went back to the vendor I bought it from, and they offered me a %15 off on a new router.

No way!  Unacceptable!  I even looked on Ebay and found the Pepwave modems there are running about half of list price.  Part of the reason I went with the Max Transit Duo was the ability to handle two active sims and two cell modems.  We actually used that feature for a while.  But with Starlink now as our second connection – I would buy something simpler, smaller and cheaper instead of the Duo.  

So, in desperation

I took the Duo down from the shelf and removed the cover.  I couldn’t find anything loose, smoked, melted etc.  I put it back together, booted it up and thought of one last thing to try.

Voila!

As I mentioned above, the Duo stores two versions of firmware.  I told it to go BACK to 8.2.0.  I rebooted running 8.2.0 – and came up with no config.  Apparently going back a version clears everything.  Then I told it to go back to 8.2.1 – reboot.  Then, since all the config was again gone, I searched my computer for an old config file – found one from June 2022 (prior to the big problem), uploaded it – and Voila!  Apparently, when the power went sketchy, something in the PEP got corrupted. Something not fixed by rebooting or even a factory reset.

It was working.  AT&T was recognized.  It was passing traffic.  It’s still working, months later, passing AT&T and Starlink traffic.