Post-Mortem: The High-Tech Holiday Weekend

To (I confess) my wife’s dismay, I dragged a ‘few’ electronics toys to the High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy, CA last weekend. I had mixed luck with them (and as a result, as well as to appease my still-grouchy spouse, I’m going to try to behave myself and more completely ‘unplug’ this weekend!). One of the success stories was a SunPower solar panel that I placed on the roof of Bertha, our ‘81 Adventurewagen, and connected to the vehicle’s dual six-volt ‘house’ battery pack. When in direct sunlight (and not covered with dust), the panel output over 4 amps of charge current (according to the regulator in-between the panel and batteries), not enough to single-handedly power our camper’s ancient, inefficient refrigerator but more than adequate to replenish battery charge lost through our use of interior lights at night. Fortunately we had AC power available to fuel the ‘fridge….except in the mid-afternoons, when abundant use of air conditioning by campers around us resulted in blown circuit breakers!

When sitting in front of a web browser, I enjoy my Sirius Satellite Radio subscription, because I can stream most of the channels through my computer’s speakers or a set of headphones. When I’m out in the middle of nowhere, I really enjoy my Sirius Satellite Radio subscription, because as long as I have an unobstructed view of the sky above me, I can listen to tunes I choose without needing to be within broadcast range of whatever terrestrial radio station is nearby (assuming, that is, I’m even interested in listening to what they’re broadcasting). We have a first-generation Audiovox-branded Sirius receiver with multiple mounting brackets, so we can move it from one car to another (as well as connect it to our living room stereo system). Our cars all have cassette decks, so we use Belkin’s Mobile Cassette Adapters to pipe the Audiovox receiver’s line output into the cars’ sound systems. Those of you without cassette decks can use a FM transmitter; most of them have a limited set of broadcast frequencies and are therefore prone to interference, but Belkin’s TuneCast II Mobile FM Transmitter (for example, a few other units also offer this feature) supports user-configurable broadcast frequencies across the entire 88.1 MHz-107.9 MHz FM band. And if I want to listen to something specific, either a cassette adapter or a FM transmitter enables me to transmogrify our portable audio players’ headphone outputs.

Before I left on the trip, I checked out cellular coverage in Quincy so I could tell the cat- and dog-sitters which number to call in case of trouble. My work cell phone uses Sprint’s CDMA service; according to Sprint’s website, there was digital roaming service in Quincy (likely via Verizon) but I knew from past experience that this meant no data service. T-Mobile’s website, on the other hand, showed available roaming GSM service and I was curious to see if GPRS data service was included (I subscribe to T-Mobile’s $20/month unlimited data plan). So I brought four Bluetooth- and GPRS-capable GSM cell phones along (an Ericsson T39 World, Sony Ericsson’s T61z and T610, and an Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone), along with a Zonet ZUB6101C Class I Bluetooth Adapter for my laptop running Windows XP SP2. Note that only the T610 came from T-Mobile; the T39 World and T61z are unlocked units originally linked to Cingular’s service, while the SMT5600 is an unlocked AT&T phone.

I spent most of my time trying out the SMT5600. In Truckee, CA, still in Cingular’s coverage area, I was successfully (albeit slowly, Sprint’s 1xRTT service speed is addictive!) able to use the phone as a wireless modem for my laptop PC. And immediately after I got to Quincy, I was again able to download email to my PC, even though I was in a different GSM provider’s coverage zone. However, I had no success the remainder of the weekend; the phone would connect and attempt authorization, then the link would terminate. Part of the problem was that thousands of music festival attendees overwhelmed the local cellular network; sometimes, I couldn’t even get a dialtone for voice calls (reminiscent of Las Vegas during CES). But I was able to access email on the phone pretty consistently the entire time….I just couldn’t use the phone as a modem to pull email into Outlook. I briefly experimented with the T39 World and got an ‘invalid AP’ message, so I suspect part of the problem may have been that I was using an unlocked phone originally intended for a non-T-Mobile network; had I tried out the T610 I might have had better luck. But then why did the SMT5600-as-modem work when I first got to Quincy?

Continued with ‘Post-Mortem: The High-Tech Holiday Weekend, Part II‘….