A Word from the Wise - Ep 4, A discussion on the Solwise Patriot range.
welcome to a word from the wise podcast from solwise we come to you the first of each month we will have a guest talking about current products news that's going on in our industry and just our opinion on stuff generally hello welcome to the next in our series of soul wise podcasts a word from the wise i'm back with daniel again we're going to talk about the patriot range today so we're going to talk about why you would want to take wi-fi kit on holiday with you the sorts of places where you could use it and some people might even use these things in the home so we shall be dealing with that today i would just say afterwards we have got some tequila sunrise so anyone who's watching this on the video we'll see what i'm talking about if you're watching if you're listening then we do have a decanter on the table we've got a new table so we have a slightly different set up here and so we can have a drink afterwards i mean i know it's only 10 o'clock in the morning yeah it is friday so on celebrating the new table i will celebrate the new table and the fact that it is a bank holiday on monday yeah so that will be good won't it so right then the patriots um if anyone's watching we have got one here on the table um and i'll describe it for uh for our listeners essentially it's an access point in a long thin tube um like a smarty tube and then it has an antenna on the top uh you can then mount it on wherever you're gonna mount it your motor home your shed a caravan your boat your barge your yacht even if you wanted to and that comes with lots of different mounting brackets uh such as uh suction cups suction pads um wall mount type stuff stuff that goes on a pearl yeah u-bolts and yes um so and we do different versions we've got a usb version with different frequencies and then there's an ethernet version so do you want to go through and tell us a bit about each and i'll leap in with some sensible questions hopefully yeah so the sort of universal drawback of wi-fi in all its forms is that it's pretty rubbish when it comes to penetrating through surfaces and that's particularly with metal surfaces like you'd get in a caravan or a boat something like that um and so the point of these kits is well you've got this patriot device this access point sort of type thing with an antenna to go on the outside and then with our kit that will go on a cable inside into whatever your caravan you bur you can prevent your house uh and that goes into a wi-fi repeater router type device which will then re-broadcast the wi-fi so you the whole whole deal of the kit is you get around this main problem with wi-fi that being the rubbish penetration through surfaces um we do a few different versions of it obviously as you said starting with the usb version because that's that's typically the one that you're going to get you've got this usb patriot on the outside of your caravan so on the standard one is 2.4 gigahertz only that's usually all you need because if you're at some kind of public campsite anywhere that does public wi-fi that you're going to want to be extending they typically only have a 2.4 gig device using to broadcast anyway because they're not going to be getting a very fast signal and they don't want to go for a massive expensive access point to broadcast wi-fi faster than they're getting so that's that's why for a while now we've only had the 2.4 gig version and it's been completely fine obviously as things are slowly moving on more and more places will eventually hopefully start doing faster wi-fi for their customers and to do that they'll have probably dual band devices that do five gigahertz as well and that's why we've uh recently brought in a dual band version of the patriot kit so it can pick up 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi signals or if there's a 5 gigahertz signal available it can pick up that instead and hopefully get faster and is that a concurrence could be could can it pick both up at the same time or do you have to choose a you can only do one at a time it can only be one wi-fi signal at a time yeah and 2.4 gig and five gig with a different wi-fi
does it choose or do you have to choose you choose you choose it's got a really good intuitive setup interface where basically you'll you'll you'll get it all physically set up first you'll get the antenna set up outside you'll connect it to the router inside then you can connect your device to the router your phone your laptop whatever and you go through the setup process you'll be brought first to a screen where it shows this good list of all the nearby wi-fi signals just like you'd see on your phone or whatever if you're connecting to wi-fi and you'll see the wi-fi names you'll see if they have passwords and you'll see the signal strength so you can if it is a site that has multiple access points broadcasting at different locations because it's quite a big site you can see which one has the strongest signal to you and connect with that one um but it it you only connect to one signal so if it's 2.4 gigahertz that's the strongest and then five gigahertz as a separate signal you might you know you'll have to make a decision there yeah and are they easy to set up i'm just mindful that um the people that there are many people that are not tech wizards and they just want something that's simple to set up one of the big advantages of the usb kits in particular 2.4 gig and the dual band version even though they have slightly different interfaces they are very intuitive interfaces because the the kits are designed for exactly this one thing which is you someone on a campsite you want him to quickly and easily get a wi-fi signal that's strong outside but weak inside and get it to be strong inside as well yeah so it's it's very easy to do because you brought straight through to a wizard that is designed to make it as easy as possible for you so even if you're someone that's not particularly tech-minded to not not not very experienced with doing anything apart from you know facebook on your phone or whatever yeah um it makes it a lot easier to do that straightforward yeah and if you were somebody that goes to the same campsite each time would you need to reset it up every time you go back or would it keep the settings if it's been switched off say for a month then you go back to the same site in your motorhome um would you need to reset it up again that actually depends uh unless you do a specific reset on your kit it's not gonna lose its connection it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna stay with the same settings that it remembers um if the site itself was to change anything about its wi-fi system if they got a new system in or if they just changed some minor details about their the wi-fi devices yeah then you would have to update it well that would make sense yeah and also if obviously if you go into multiple different sites you'll have to redo the setup at each site yeah um but if if they don't change anything and if you don't change it in the meantime then yeah it can just be plug and play basically yeah that's working well i only ask we used to have a motor home and we've been away and we took the patriot with us um and we most weekends we'd go up to um north yorkshire to the same site because we go out on our bikes and stuff like that so we'll go back to the same place um and it would be useful if you didn't have to keep resetting if you're going to the same place but as you say i suppose if they change the password then you kind of stuff don't you you really have even if you weren't using the kit you'd have to change your stuff there yeah yeah we we've used it um on a motorhome um works real well with suction cups obviously it's no good for traveling is it so you've got to take it off when you're traveling because it's not a practical device to leave on there we do have other kit for roof mounting on caravans moto homes and the light but uh this is not a permanently mounted device but we've also used it on a tent which i think fewer people do but if you've got a sturdy pole then you can use the u-bolts and it'll stay on there it's flexible yeah and years ago we took one of the original ones you might recall because we had some problems but we took one to portugal used it on a cabin there um the problem that came up there if you remember was when you left the cabin that we stayed in it turned the electric off which stopped this being oh well maybe that was the router i can't remember it yeah it was it was the router itself that's part of this patriot kit it used to have a problem where if the if you powered it off it would forget all its settings that's it yeah but that's been solved now hasn't it so anyone who's got an older one may find they have that problem but the newer ones don't lose their settings when they lose the power yeah yeah that was very irritating a week of you know going out during the day and uh coming back and having to reset it all up but it was quite useful though and it fits in your hand luggage if you take it out of the box it does fit in your normal hand luggage it's it's just even the router itself is it's small and neat isn't it yes it's a small small little rectangular box yeah so and for us that that was quite useful because the cabin we were in was right at the back of the site so we could p but the site was on a hill which was quite useful because it was then tipped into such a way we picked it up and then we got a great signal we had a kid with us you know so he wanted to get on the internet and watch youtube like kids do um you're a bit young for all that and then i mean i've got listed here that we use on campus and so on but marinas as well people are using this stuff on boats barges yeah narrow boats and the like they run into the exact same problems as you get with caravans and camper vans where because the boats exterior is metal it's really tricky for wi-fi to yeah um so yes it helps with the exact same exact same thing which leads us on i suppose to i've got one on the back of my house and the one i've got is the patriot db the ethernet version so why could you want to explain why you'd haven't the use the ethernet one over the usb one yeah the ethernet one it's tricky because it's it's really it's a different sort of product so we don't do it as part of a kit for example it's a standalone item but it can be used in the same way still but it's still an access point because these usb devices they are purely wi-fi extenders they all they can be used for is picking up wi-fi and then taking it down on a usb cable either directly into a laptop or into one of the routers as part of our kits so we then do it as more wi-fi but the patriot db is just a proper ethernet access point so its main function is as an access point to broadcast wi-fi right it broadcasts its own wi-fi it doesn't need a reacher on its own to do that part and that's how we've got it set up so ours is on the back of our house and then feeds the garden as it were the wi-fi there yeah but then because it's quite quite a good access point it's got other functionalities it's got other operation modes that you can set it up in one of them being as a repeater so you can still use it in the same way where you've got it in a repeater mode where you tell it to pick up this nearby wi-fi signal yeah and then you can bring it down on an ethernet cable into it could be one of the 3000 a routers that comes with this kit or it can just be any old ethernet router really like we do the the tender f300 which is the cheapest chips isn't it yeah uh you can go straight into that and that will work with it just fine and it will work in the same way it's not quite as intuitive to set up because it's not the main purpose so like you get one of these usb patriots set up with the usb routers that it comes with it's designed just to be set up in that way so it guides you through it quite easily it's not quite so simple with this you it's we have instructions that it comes with and it's still yeah it's not 30 pages long though compared to the three pages you've got on the usb device so essentially what he's trying to get around in a polite manner is saying that he could do with a bit more networking experience be a bit more tech savvy with regards setting access points up yeah and then you might get one because it's a more complicated product yeah um and probably beyond what some people need definitely that that's well as as i said for the most part in most places it's still only 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi signals yeah most places still aren't doing dual bandwidth five gigahertz so with the the dual bands usb patriot usually being more than you need the patriot db definitely is yeah um i mean there are possible reasons you still want to get it like because it can be used as an outdoor access point it's quite flexible in terms of how you use it so if you wanted to theoretically at some point maybe stop using it as a repeater and use it as an access point like in the future perhaps for a different site or something like that well there you go it's got lots of different modes like that but it could be good if somebody say got a home office in the garden you know a summer house or a purpose-built thing in the garden using it that type of thing like i do you can use it like that and then if you go on a holiday you can take it down and take it with you and use it in its other mode as a repeater yeah so save a bit there but then you have to put it back up again so well and there is that yeah i would have to get a ladder out to do that because what the way arsenal is is it's uh it comes out of it's it's on the wall outside the back bedroom um and then it goes in our back bedroom's got um the poe switching and it just goes straight into that switch which then is further connected in from there so um that works quite well but so you said about using it with a router could you use it with the with an access point as well yeah because we've got a number of different routers and access points on the site if somebody wanted to use that as an extent use the patriot db as the extender um they could use that with something that's highest spec access point if they wanted to you're not just have to use it with the usb ah or the f300 no they can use like a dual band ethernet router or a proper dedicated access point and is there anything that it wouldn't work with can you think of or do you think it would probably work with most things not really no not nothing nothing it shouldn't work with yeah okay so what we've done on the website uh is daniel has actually written an article about this which hopefully will make things a bit clearer for people and we will link to that in the description we've also re-jigged the web page so the patriots now are all on the same page the page if you're looking in the menu of the website the page is called outdoor wi-fi patriot extenders which just rolls off the tongue doesn't it and we'll put a link to that page in the uh in the description also and uh but this is one of those subjects where i think you either get it straight away or you don't but people can always ring can't they they can always give us a chat one of the things we get the most amount of calls about really i'd say is uh people inquiring about this kit who are looking to go on holiday and stuff like that so especially this this time of year well that's true yeah so this is the may recording so it's uh yeah definitely this time of year people are looking at this type of thing now we used to do a 4g version which is no longer available and we do other things for that though don't we which we have covered in previous podcasts um but we do quite a wide range so if you wanted this is obviously just full on wi-fi isn't it there's no 4g option at all but if you wanted something else you could look at um so if you if you had a patriot and for instance are the one from pointing for 4g could the patriot work with one of the teltonika routers um i've put you on the spot a bit there because that's a question that we seen what's going to depend what you mean by work with it you couldn't use a patriot to pick up stronger wi-fi and take it down into a teltonika router right because it can't essentially where i was going with that is could you get away with just having one router that did 4g and wi-fi but the i'm guessing your answer is no you'd have to have two routers so you'd have to have for instance you could you would have to use a patriot db it would have to be the ethernet patriot db couldn't be one of the usb ones yeah it could be done you'd have to set the basically what you'd alternate between different primary one inputs for the router depending on if you're currently using the wi-fi or the 4g um and if you wanted to use wi-fi you'd change the main one input to ethernet get the patriot db setup and run it into the wang port on the router right and then if you wanted to switch to 4g you would just switch the one input to uh 4g so it's probably this that that situation is probably aimed at your more techy person i was just thinking if you were going to do a european road trip um it just and because obviously you're limited on space when you go away in your motor home your caravan tents and so on so you you don't want to take a whole bunch of different routers that that was my thinking behind that yeah yeah so you could but obviously probably for the more techie amongst us and you you could also just get a antenna a 4g antenna that also supports wi-fi yeah that that would also work as a way of doing that oh yes that's a good idea so if it might the uh the memo or the puck range yeah excellent oh well i think that's pretty much covered everything we need to talk about on this particular subject i think it's intelligent actually yeah i think yes well thank you very much for watching uh we will be back next month the podcasts are available via video on youtube or wherever you get your podcast from spotify amazon music apple podcasts and the like if you have any questions by all means give us a ring pop us an email across we're sales at soulwise.com uk uh check out the website where all these products are listed and um i think that's about it i think so too drink tea tequila sunrise i think or Sarah who produces this podcast said it looked like a sex on the beach i'm not entirely sure maybe it's because i'm old i thought it was a tequila sunrise but anyway we'll go for a drink then sure thank you very much thank you bye
2022-05-05 03:12
