Cool and sunny at wake up time, but a return to higher temperatures later in the day with a high of 26°C.
We took advantage of the free breakfast service offered here for the first time this morning, we didn’t do it earlier as we were afraid of making it a habit! We had waffles, orange juice and coffee, not bad for the price and very popular with the residents.
Back at the trailer it was time to continue yesterdays battle. All I was trying to do was add a 4G stick to the internet system here so that we could improve the the Skype and telephone connections. The WiFi here is normally pretty good for downloading, e-Mail and surfing, but lousy for audio and video. I bought a USB stick for T-Mobile off eBay and headed out to the T-Mobile store to get a SIM card and a data plan. Back at the trailer, I managed to get the stick to connect, but only at very slow speeds. The connection was far from perfect and many times the connection could not be made. This was worse than the WiFi. The stick finally gave up and I was not able to connect to the cell network.
A couple of hours later a connection was made again, it seemed to be better this time so I tried a Skype call with Paul and the grand-kids. It was perfect, I was finally happy ……. until I found out that the stick had died and the system reverted back to the resort WiFi!! We must have caught it at a quiet time.
Enough was enough, time to declare the stick dead and start proceedings to get a refund. More research last night and plan B was to get a small MiFi unit, instead of receiving the cell signal and receiving it through USB at the computer, this unit receives the cell signal and converts it to WiFi.
I set it up, but the SIM card was smaller than the one I bought yesterday! There was a SIM card with the unit so I figured it would be easy to have T-Mobile transfer the data allowance from one card to another…. wrong, they are not allowed to do that, “Sorry Sir, you’ll have to throw that data away and buy some more”…. Wrong! A little bit of thinking and a pair of snips seemed to be the answer. I cut the larger card down to the size of the smaller one, and presto the new device now works on the old SIM card. Take that T-Mobile.
The new device works at full 4G speed, and hopefully it will improve the Skype and phone calls.
After I got back this morning, Lyn headed out on her own to do the weekly shopping, I think she was secretly pleased that she was going alone for a change.
After lunch we headed out for some geo-caching. There are many areas around here where sub-divisions have been laid out, roads put in etc, but no houses built as a result of the real estate crash around 2008. These make ideal hiding places for the caches, we got all six of the ones we were looking for. On the way back from there I dropped the USB stick in the mail to get a refund! Hopefully the electrons will learn who is boss.