off the grid tent camping/cell phones/power banks

[New Haven]

I am able to connect my battery powered laptop at home to my phone's wifi signal . I have several battery packs that keep the phone charged if the power is off for more than 4 hours. I also do this while tent camping when there is no power but yet a wifi signal. If your cell phone does not have this feature you could connect to someone's else's phone that does.

I decided to upgrade all of my technology for tent camping "off the grid"

I now have portable solar panels ----brand Goal Zero --to recharge the battery packs

I replaced my old/tired Dell laptop with a new LG "Gram" laptop that weighs less than 3 pounds and easily connects to my cell phone. It also has a battery that last 12 hours.

The campgrounds cost about $20 per night so I don't really have a big lodging cost. I can easily afford the newer technology.

I must confess that I watch Youtube videos --Amazon----Netflix and get my email and do Zoom meetings with all of this on a fixed SS only income. You might also be able to "pool" the wifi signal through the "hotspot" feature.

My attitude is that communication is the most important part of my life and I create a budget that provides for the best technology. I do not have cable TV for over 15 years now. I got rid of my land line also 10 years ago. Some people ask me "Where do you get your news if you don't have cable TV" ? I ask them where do the 'NOT GET" theirs when they are captive to whatever a "program manager decides to put on cable tv. I have "boots on the ground" reporters at ----https://www.aljazeera.com/tag/ukraine-russia-crisis/

I have over 50 different news websites bookmarked on my laptop----Google Chrome browser" I also use Facebook messenger instead of my phone to call around to my children in London, New York and Charleston. If I ever have to go to assisted living the wifi signal will be the first consideration , but I always plan to have the Iphone. and Ipad as a backup to the laptop.

I am extremely grateful for the people on DU who usually have a pretty good take on current happenings

[hunter]

1. Like you, my wife and I quit cable television a long time ago.

Partly it was the cost, which was approaching forty dollars a month when we quit, and partly it was the fact I didn't want to be paying for crap like Fox News even if I never watched it.

5G cell service has come to our neighborhood and some of my neighbors are using it for full time internet service. I'm not certain how that works. The last time I looked the "unlimited video" on these plans was automatically downscaled to 480 lines, which is DVD quality and would be good enough for us. My wife and I mostly watch the lowest priced Netflix streaming or DVDs.

For home internet we have a DSL connection that we've had for a very long time, from before Comcast or our phone company even offered their own internet service.

We can also connect to the internet through my wife's cell phone. I can use my cell phone as well, but my data plan is too limited for casual video streaming.

For power outages we have a 100 watt solar panel, charge controller, and some batteries. That's enough to recharge phones in some disaster, which would be useful assuming the cell phone system stays up as well.

We've yet to have a power outage that lasted long enough to completely drain the batteries of the uninterruptible power supply our DSL modem and wifi server are attached to.

My wife and I don't watch any television news or opinion. We read our news and have subscriptions to several online newspapers. My wife has never watched television news and I quit in disgust shortly after 9/11/2001. I'd been reading DU from its beginning, but first signed on in February, twenty years ago. Yeah, DU is important to me.

Looking at our adult children and their cousins I think traditional television and radio is dying. They stream everything, even in their cars.

Our children work mostly at home in businesses that are heavily dependent on the internet. They have very fast fiber internet connections direct to their homes. I don't think they'd live anywhere that didn't have that.

For better or worse electronic communication has changed the world. Mostly for the better, I think, in spite of all the crap.