Router for RV use

Hi,

for my Campervan I bought a Teltonika RUT955. I bought that one, because it was relatively cheap and the RUTX50 was not available at the time I bought it. But at the moment I can't get the WiFi to work, so I started thinking if there is a better Router for me.

What I am looking for:

  • We travel with it, so I am looking for a 4g LTE Modem (5g would be even better) and 2,4 and 5 GHz WiFi an extarnal Antanne is necessary.
  • Ethernet would be needed only for administration of the Router (if I switch of the WiFi accidently :innocent:)
  • no need for USB
  • We would 4 Users with up to 8 devices (sometime 3 will stream at the same time)
  • VPN would be good to have
  • Price is not the first problem 350 to 400 € are okay, for the perfect one I am willing to spend more (let’s say 500 €).

Maybe one of you has a good idea!

Thank you,

Christian

Just a suggestion: Assuming your RV power source is still 12 VDC, perhaps you may wanna consider the router with a 12 VDC power source to avoid any additional DC2DC conversion.

As usual when the question about LTE modems comes up, I would suggest using a decommissioned mobile phone and tethering it via USB. It doesn't need to be anything recent (two years ago I used an old Android 5 phone) and it doesn't even need to hold much of a charge since it will be powered/charged via the same USB connection. And using a, let's say, 2 meter USB cable you can position it for optimum reception off the router itself.

The rest of your requirements should be easily doable within a fraction of your price expectations. I see nothing even a lower-powered device wouldn't be able to do. (Other than the missing 5GHz wifi, your existing Teltonika router would probably serve you fine if you don't expect exceptional speeds using OpenVPN or are able to use WireGuard VPN.)

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Wow, very fast answer! Thank you!

Mazila, you are absolutly right, the RV power is 12VDC (230 VAC available, but 12V is prefered). That was one of the reasons, why I got an Teltonika Router in the first try.

Thank you for yoru reply takimata,

In my posting I forgot to write, that we need external Antennas outside the RV (I corrected that). In beautiful places mobile reception is (at least in Germany) sometimes poor.

Well for around 10-15 Euros, you can get https://openwrt.org/toh/xiaomi/miwifi_mini which will fullfill your needs. I have that one. Works great, but never tested it on 12V. In the wiki page it is mentioned that it works with even a battery.
Kind regards

Nominally. In practice the in-car voltage varies quite a bit, a fully charged car battery can easily reach 14V, and can drop significantly below 12V in other situations. That's why devices intended for RV use are purposefully designed to be very tolerant towards voltage fluctuations (usually between 10 and 18V). I wouldn't trust that a common electronics device designed to run off a 12V PSU can handle that.

Source: being the son of a car master mechanic

2 Likes

Thank you for all your input. I also see the voltage point. So I'll give my RUT955 another try.

Thank you once again,

Christian

GL.iNet makes some purpose built devices that you may want to be aware of. These are battery powered and have 4G built in, but there are others with less bells. They run OpenWRT with a proprietary GUI and have a lot of good features built in for road warrior use.

Dual Band GL-E750 - Mudi
Single Band GL-XE300 (Puli)

There are other "Travel Routers" in the line up that do not have internal power or 4G, but run on USB power like the GL-AR 750S-EXT (Slate)

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