How I work on the road (with no Starlink)

Mark Allen shares how he manages both reception (without Starlink) and power when working on the road in remote destinations.

Working on the road may seem like an ideal job, penning wonderful yarns for Australia’s top magazines. You know, feet up, relaxing at an idyllic beach, in front of a campfire, sipping on cold drinks without a care in the world while you hammer away at the keyboard. It is a great way to earn a few bob, but it’s not all sunshine and roses.

Ya’ see, not every day is a warm sunny experience. We sometimes have cold, windy, rainy, miserable weather. As for roses, they must be the most twisted, deceitful and cunning flowers I’ve ever known. Sure, they may put off an aromatic waft and suggest visions of pleasure. But man, those little thorns hurt like hell.

My point is, it’s not always an easy, pleasant experience – working on the road has its downsides. Not that I’d swap it for a nine-to-five office job, but there are a few drawbacks that you should be aware of, just in case you’re contemplating giving it a go.

Nine weeks, ten thousand kilometres

I’ve just returned from a mammoth trip from the mid-north coast of NSW to the Flinders Ranges, all over the shop around the red centre, the West and East MacDonnell Ranges, southern QLD, the north coast of NSW and then home. Nine weeks and just shy of 10,000 kilometres in our 4×4 converted HiAce campervan saw me create a handful of videos, write bucket loads of articles, and snap off over 4,100 photos. The latter which requires downloading, editing, filing and allocating to future articles.

While writing the articles on a laptop is relatively easy; hey, open the lid, turn it on and start writing – right? It’s the sending-off that is the hard part. Phone and internet reception have played a significant role in this game since we stopped burning our articles to CD, dropping them into the post office and hoping the Postie gets it all to the editors in good time.

I don’t have a satellite phone or Starlink setup – yet. I have relied on phone reception for calls and email data at varying speeds. Obviously, phone reception can’t be relied on everywhere. Still, most towns have reception, so if I ever need to upload or download anything to my drives, that’s where it gets done. Hot spotting my laptop while parked on the side of the road or, perhaps, near a shopping complex or the like that offers free WiFi.

Enter Telstra T-Go repeater

This last trip away, I’ve been trialling a Telstra T-Go repeater which we’ve had installed in our van. In short, it greatly helps in some areas but can only be relied on in some situations. If there is a skerrick of mobile reception, the T-Go will boost it to a usable degree. If there is no reception at all to start with, then you get no reception – simple!

I was amazed at the areas we did have reception between remote, rural towns and a few extremely remote destinations. We tried to use designated roadside mobile phone boosting towers a few times. Yes, they helped a little, but we found our system worked better and even offered our van to bystanders to use. Provided their phone was on the Telstra system, all found they managed better reception to get a call through.

Our T-Go system utilises a small magnetic antenna on the van’s roof, but once our bullbar is installed, a taller version will be fitted. I don’t know how much difference the two antennae may make, but the more help we get with reception, the better.

Go to the pub

I had to upload edited videos a few times, but the poor phone reception either didn’t allow the upload or was going to take many hours. So, to make light of a bad situation, a trip to the local (which could have been a couple of hours away) pub in rural towns where there are no shopping centres would be best. Parked near the pub, with phone and laptop set to do their things, we wandered in to savour a cold drink and pub grub – just perfect!

12 and 240-Volt power

Laptops only last so long until they need charging. Given our van was equipped with a complete RedArc system that could put out both 12 and 240 volts, it was easy to either recharge or power directly from the system via a 240-volt socket to the inverter. Regardless of weather and time of day or night, my office was often under the Bush Company 180-degree awning at the side of the van. At night, I’d hang my LED lighting, again plugged into the RedArc system, and at times I’d have a couple of walls attached to the awning to help keep the wind out or prevent the sun from shining on the screen.

That same battery bank also allows us to recharge the batteries of our phones, cameras, power tools – my recip saw got fair old workout cutting firewood – and all the other high-tech gadgets we take away with us. Yes, the inverter has its own 240-volt socket, but we’ve had a couple of dual 240 sockets added to the van fit-out, making our life on the road much easier and more convenient.

Eat like kings

Given we had plenty of 12-volt power, we opted to use a fridge freezer from MyCoolman. The freezer allowed us to pre-make a heap of good healthy meals before we left and transfer them from the freezer to the fridge as needed. Even when we had to restock food, packing portions of meats and other foods into the freezer allowed us to stay remote for much more extended periods while still eating good healthy meals… read, not relying on baked beans or other tinned foods!

Yes, running the freezer uses a lot of extra power, and we could hear the compressor cycling more at night while inside, but the advantages far outweigh that higher power usage.

Other than the few occasions of lack of reception to make calls or send emails, we did surprisingly well. Looking into the latest offerings of satellite phones and kits will be on our list of to-do jobs, although there are downsides to being in contact all the time – I reckon the “off switch” might get used as an excuse not to take incoming work calls, eh!