Published May, 2000
Hello, again. This is Sam, and I have been surfing the Internet to check up on a serious issue for many RVers: how to communicate when traveling. When you are out in your RV, away from home and your landline telephone, you are cut off in another world. People have a hard time reaching you, and sometimes, you have an even harder time getting in touch with someone else. What can you do??? The world is changing rapidly, and the links I have today will help find a way that works for you.
The most low-tech way to communicate is to send snail-mail back to your friends. Snail-mail? Oh, that's the paper that is carried around by the US Postal Service. Moves at a snail's pace, comparatively speaking.
But what if you want to receive snail-mail, especially when you are away from home for a month or more and if you don't pay that Visa bill they are going to ripe up your credit card? If you have a son, daughter, or really good friend who can collect your mail, they can put it in a big envelope and send it to you, wherever you are. Lacking a personal assistant, you can use a mail-forwarding service. There are several such services available and you can find ads in many RV magazines. One described on the Internet at http://www.escapees.com/website/support/mail.htm is from Escapees. The site tells you about what to expect from such services and sets a standard for your alternatives.
If the written word is too slow, you need a phone. You can use a payphone and calling card, but it is more convenient to use a cell-phone. If you have a home base, you may already have a cell-phone associated with your landline phone at home. If you travel more extensively across the country, you may be looking at one of the nation-wide plans like AT&T One Rate which provides no-roaming, no-long-distance but requires that you sign up and pay for a bundle of minutes each month. One of the best discussions of cell-phones for RVers that I have found is in Ned Reiter's Home Page at http://www.rvnetwork.com/members/reiter/. Take a look before you commit..
Now that we have discussed the traditional means of communication, let's look at what is available with the Internet. The simplest use of the Internet is email. Traditional email requires that you have an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to which you connect by phone from your computer. ISPs most often have a monthly charge, but you can also find free email services. Take a look at the Free Email Address Directory at http://www.emailaddresses.com/ for over 1,000 possibilities.
The biggest issue you will find on the road is selecting a provider that allows you to connect your computer (laptop?) by phone on the road without a long-distance charge. Preferred ISPs have an 800-number service (which may cost) and/or many local POPs (points of presence) around the country.
But sometimes on the road you still cannot find a phone with an RJ-11 jack for your modem or a toll-free number in the area. What to do? Now there is a very, very simple way to obtain email on the road. It is PocketMail, whose primary website can be found at http://www.pocketmail.com/.
PocketMail offers a $9.95 per month email post-office service that is accessible from any phone (including pay phones) from anywhere in the country using an 800 number. Special devices like the Sharp TM-20, JVC HC E-100, and PalmPilot BackFlip link to the PocketMail post-office using a proprietary acoustic coupler technique licensed from PocketMail Science. The PocketMail post-office can be primary, or a proxy for your current email post-office. The ability to filter your emails by first looking at sender and subject gives you control over what you receive. Attachments are not allowed. However, transmission rates are limited to the range of 1000 characters per minute -- not a speed for long-winded emails.
PocketMail is okay for brief messages, but what if you are one of those who is going to surf on the web, even if you have to blow the waves up yourself. You need true Internet access. You can get a national provider like AOL or Earthlink, but that costs around twenty dollars per month. If you want to limit the fees the Internet Service Providers charge each month, what can you do?
Now there are free ISPs, providers who let you access the Internet as long as you wish but do not charge you a monthly fee. Of course, nothing is free; they do ask that you allocate some part of your computer screen to an ever-changing advertisement. If you are interested is this kind of trade, take a look at http://internet4free.homepage.com/AccessNumbers.htm for a detailed list of free service providers sorted by area code. You can try out one or many. Some are friendlier than others are about how they use your screen, but none of them like you to open new windows without their ads.
Next is the problem of finding a phone connection for your Internet access. I always try to work through the office of the campground where we are staying in some way. Sometimes I stay in an RV park where they have telephone access right at the post on my site. Typical cost for that kind of service is one or two dollars per day for such a service. Take a look at http://hometown.aol.com/winfield3/page13/OVERNI_1.HTM for a well-maintained list of such Internet Friendly RV Parks parks across the country.
Most often your phone time is limited, and then it becomes a question of how to make best use of the available time. One reader sent me a great suggestion: use a specialized web-browser tool that copies a URL to your local disk and then view the website offline. There are several such programs. One I have used most recently is WebCopier, found at http://home.columbus.rr.com/mklimov/. This is a multifunctional offline browser that will reconstruct a website, or a specified portion of one, on your hard disk in a form that is viewable after you have disconnected from the Internet.
And, finally, the marriage of the telephone and the Internet is becoming complete. Now you can use the Internet as a telephone service provider. Go to http://www.dialpad.com/ to register for a free service that allows you to use your computer to call any other telephone in the country, without cost. It works best when you have a high-quality microphone/earphone headset and a 56K connection. You can place a call to a phone number, and the service will make a local connection to that number, all without charge. There may be some interference on the line, especially if your Internet connection is slow, but it is usable.
That's it for this issue. During the June and July time frame, we are traveling north to attend the Escapees Fun Days 2000 Rally in Kamloops, British Columbia . The website http://www.escapees.com/website/fundays/ has information about that rally and some good advice for traveling with an RV into Canada. Maybe we will see you there. Drive safely.