Dick Eastman's RV

How to Hide a Cell Phone Tower in Arizona

Yellow Jacket iPhone Stun Gun Case

This has got to be the ultimate gadget. You can convert your innocuous-looking iPhone into a snarling defensive weapon. A new iPhone case also houses a 650,000-volt stun gun. That should be quite the defensive weapon! It looks about like any other iPhone case and shouldn't raise eyebrows wherever you carry it. Somehow, I have to believe this thing will be illegal in a number of states.

The Yellow Jacket iPhone stun gun case also provides another use: it is capable of giving your phone up to 20 hours of additional standby battery. Apparently, a stun gun uses very heavy duty batteries!

This is no joke.

DeLorme inReach for Messaging Wherever You Are

Ten percent of the world has cell phone coverage. Obviously, that also means that 90% of the world is outside cell phone range. That includes a lot of places where RVs (recreational vehicles) travel.

Most interstate highways have excellent cell phone coverage, as do most metropolitan areas. While RVs do spend a lot of time on the highways, they also appear in rural areas more often than in cities. I have stayed at more than one RV resort where the cell phone coverage was either spotty or non-existent.

How about data coverage? Can an RV owner surf the web or send and receive e-mail? The answer is... "sometimes." Some campgrounds provide wi-fi coverage while others do not. Many RV owners purchase "air cards" to connect laptop computers to the Internet via a local cell tower; but, air cards have the same limitations as cell phones: they don't work too well in rural areas beyond the reach of the nearest cell tower. Air cards are useless in 90% of the world.

Always Have a Battery Jumper Available

A reader asked me a question about my recent article describing computerized phone systems for home use at http://eogn.com/wp/?p=19020 (user name and password required). I mentioned that a cell phone has always worked well for me and for my neighbors during power outages. Indeed, a cell phone is the only phone service that has proven to be reliable during power outages in our area.

My correspondent asked, "How did you keep your cell phone charged during the hurricane and snowstorm outages?"  I thought I would share my answer here with everyone.

Charging a cell phone is easy. Plug it into the cigarette lighter socket in the automobile. An auto battery will power and charge a cell phone for weeks.

Roaming Charges Add $200,000 to A Cell Phone Bill

Beware! Using your cell phone in new places can add hundreds of thousands to your bill. In a recent case, taking a U.S. cell phone into Canada and not even making a single voice call resulted in $201,000 for a single month of charges. In a recent case, the user is deaf and cannot make voice calls. However, he did use it often for text messaging and he used Internet-streaming services while in Canada.

After a lot of television publicity was generated, the cellphone provider agreed to drastically lower the charge to "only" $2,500 and gave the phone's owner six months to pay off the fee. Still, that's a huge fee for something that the user didn't realize in advance would cost thousands of dollars.