Wi-Fi on the Road

Here's how to get internet on your laptop when free wifi is not available

As I've mentioned in previous articles, I often travel and camp in my motorhome.

My favorite places to camp are those far off the beaten path. Like the Everglades of south Florida or the Treasure coast beaches on Florida's east coast.

Usually these remote sites have little or no amenities and almost never offer internet access. That can be a problem since my business requires I be able to connect to the internet several times a day.

Yes, I can connect to the internet using my smartphone but I find the tiny screen and keyboard not really suitable to writing articles or doing the other kinds of work I need to do on the web.

To get around this, I use free software to tether my laptop computer to my cell phone, allowing the laptop to access the internet through the cell phone's data plan.

With this software, you simply connect your cellphone USB charger cable to a USB port on your laptop, set the cellphone USB port to diagnostic mode, and it opens up the internet on your laptop.

Do that and you can access the internet using the full size keyboard and screen on the laptop, the same as if you were connected to the internet via wifi.

To make this work, you download free PDAnet software on your laptop before you leave home, and also add the free PDAnet app to your phone (the app works with Android, iPhone and Blackberry). Find it athttp://junefabrics.com/index.php

Then when you want to connect to the net, you connect the phone's USB charging cable to your laptop, start pdanet on both the phone and laptop and connect to the internet.

Your phone company treats this as a phone call and not data usage, so there isn't any extra charge to do this.

Note: The free version of PdaNet gives full access to the internet for 21 days. After that, the free edition blocks secure web sites and you'll have to upgrade to the paid version if you want to gain access to secure sites.

I use PDAnet everytime I'm on the road and am very surprised and pleased with how well it works.