MIFi

Every use case is different. I only mentioned it as it's something most people don't think about!

Mrs S even managed to continue a video call seamlessly walking from the house to the van and carried on while we drove off.

Well, I was driving, obviously, but you get my point!

Virtual SIM. Ah. Yes. Teltonika don't supply an adapter for those :D (actually one of my only gripes with them is that they provide a set of SIM adapters, which is great, but it's a dual SIM unit so... They could have spent the exta 5p and supplied two sets of adapters)

Adapters - looks like they're TS-9 then (threaded 'nut' on one end going to a smooth cylinder with a hole in the centre on the other?) i.e. anyone looking at the Puck to go with an M1 wouldn't need to buy adapters as they're included now. Pretty cool!

iDmobile are very competitive.

£15/month for their unlimited everything plan - however they have a 'fair use' 30GB limit abroad.

That's pretty good as they use the Three network who have a 12GB limit included when roaming.

What I couldn't see with iDmobile was the option to 'top it up'. With Three I can buy a 'Data Passport' for £5/day which gives me unlimited and unthrottled data abroad.

They might have a similar option, but even Three bury it deep in their description and don't advertise it so it might be worth just getting in touch with them and asking.
30 gig for a month is probably enough, I checked out the data I used on the phone and found that I’d done 60 or so since the start of April, and I was only abroad for a week or so, so some of that must have been UK use.

I really ought to try out doing CAD using my phone as the hotspot, but the signal is crap here. I’ll pick up a cheap PAYG over the weekend to try out, then buy an IDmobile before we go back to the boat.

As an aside, it seems you can’t get a French sim without a French address/bank a/c, which is a bollox.
 
Just to put a conclusion to this, where I live has pretty poor mobile coverage, but I set the kit up this afternoon with a PAYG SIM from EE. I was able to get onto the office VPN and fire up Solidworks and some other apps pretty much the same as if I’d used the domestic BT broadband.

It was possibly slightly laggier than the (copper) broadband, but entirely useable. The signal strength was “poor”, and I’m confident that if I were to be somewhere with a better signal, it’s going to be great.

Grateful thanks to Fil and everyone who contributed - cheers guys.
 
Thanks for the feedback SBD - I really had no idea how it would behave with VPN and Solidworks - but if it's useable on a 'poor' signal then I'm pretty impressed!

I know that Poynting and Teltonika tech teams have started talking to each other so that particular combination of router/antenna is pretty hard to beat at the moment (without going to Starlink costs)

I'd put the Netgear M1 in a close second. It's technically speaking capable of faster speeds than the RUT260 as it's CAT 16 LTE rather than CAT 6. (so theoretically capable of 1GB rather than 300Mbps) but my real world experience has been that unless you're really close to a mast it doesn't make all that much difference (and if you're really close to a mast and getting 2-300Mbps then you're probably going to be quite happy with that!)
 
Antenna - a little advice please: I’m about to buy an antenna for my van, I think I want a Poynting Puck but don’t understand much of the technicalities. I’m guessing the Puck 5 is the latest and best one but is it more than I need? The sites that sell these things seem to sell the full range obviously at different prices, which suggests that the newer versions don’t make the previous version obsolete. I no idea what I need but something that is easy to install and works straight out of the box is important to me.
TIA
 
I went through the pain of trying to figure out which antenna went with what...

It's not as straight forward as it could be.

The best way to figure it out is actually to start with the MiFi router/hotspot and work backwards.

No need to have an antenna with GPS if your router doesn't support it etc...

Remind me what you have and I'll see if I can narrow the field down for you :thumb2
 
Teltonika RUT260 but I haven’t fitted it yet. I bought it from these people https://www.wlan-shop24.de and I’ve just been looking at the Poynting Pucks they do - I’m tempted by the Puck 2.
 
Last edited:
Puck 2 or Puck 3 would be my suggestion.

The RUT260 has two mobile and one WiFi antenna.

The Puck 2 doesn't have WiFi, the Puck 3 does.

However, the Puck 3 seems to be new and I can't find it for sale in the UK yet!

It looks like it's been created exactly for the RUT260 as your next step up to an antenna with WiFi is the Puck-5 (The Puck-4 has three antennas, but the third one is GPS so no use to you). The Puck-5 also has GPS so you end up paying for something you're not using.

Of course, you might not want, need or care about connecting to WiFi networks (mine is capable of it, but I've never done it other than when testing) - in which case the Puck-2 is exactly what you want.

Hope that's helpful :thumb2
 
Puck 2 or Puck 3 would be my suggestion.

The RUT260 has two mobile and one WiFi antenna.

The Puck 2 doesn't have WiFi, the Puck 3 does.

However, the Puck 3 seems to be new and I can't find it for sale in the UK yet!

It looks like it's been created exactly for the RUT260 as your next step up to an antenna with WiFi is the Puck-5 (The Puck-4 has three antennas, but the third one is GPS so no use to you). The Puck-5 also has GPS so you end up paying for something you're not using.

Of course, you might not want, need or care about connecting to WiFi networks (mine is capable of it, but I've never done it other than when testing) - in which case the Puck-2 is exactly what you want.

Hope that's helpful :thumb2
Very helpful, thanks very much.
 
Well, BT excelled themselves this morning and turned off our fibre broadband at work again (they did it last Monday too, it's called "getting an upgrade" :unsure: ) so the RUT260 and Puck5 are doing their job again.


according to BT, "the Engineer is on site". According to our entry log, (s)he isn't on our site!

meanwhile the MIFI is rocking on!



1720440940709.png
 
Puck 2 antenna arrived so spent Friday afternoon installing the router and puck in the van. The new SIM card had to be activated which involved a fair amount of faffing about on the phone to Orange but once that was sorted it was just a quick run through the set up wizard on the Teltonika and it all seems to working fine.

One little issue was the qr code on the bottom of the router worked fine with my phone but didn’t work with other devices (another iphone and two ipads). All these devices successfully joined my son’s new fibre optic network the other day by flashing the tiny qr code on a plastic card that came with the router. I think the printing on the Teltonika case is a bit blurd.
 


Back
Top Bottom