relo and 5G router installation

pickup and relo

It was starting to get perilously close to freezing in the mountains above Taos and I had an amazon package arriving in town. I made a command decision to relo several days before the 14d timer ran out.

I hit the library while waiting for the Amazon OUT FOR DELIVERY package to arrive at the locker. Updated my devices and did media downloads over their wifi.

Picked up the package and headed to Los Alamos.

Los Alamos

I was undecided on Santa Fe vs Los Alamos then a deciding factor dawned on me: if I went to Los Alamos first I could pick up General Delivery either in Alamos or along the way in Tesuque. GD pickup in Santa Fe is terrible because there is only metered parking anywhere near the main post office. And that’s the only PO that has GD. Plus now with scooter barnacled onto the back of the van I can’t fit in a metered spot anyhow.

So I chose Los Alamos and pulled into a ~8,200ft boondocking spot that afternoon. After setting up a minimal camp I came in and unpacked the new router.

setting up the new router

I wired up the Spitz router’s WAN port to the Cudy router that was being retired. A last gasp.

The LAN port went to the laptop.

I put the physical eSim card card into the SIM 2 slot since it will be the failover service. The Visible SIM was still in the Cudy because I wanted to be online for the next few steps.

personality transplant

The Spitz has life-transitioned and now identifies as my Moto G Fast Verizon-compatible phone; I’m happy if it’s happy.

firmware update

There were (preview of what will happen below) actually three flashes:

1. firmware update from the UI, which acted suspiciously squirrelly¹
2. although I thought the above should have eSIM features, I flashed a late 2024 version that had beta-added that feature.
3. then a retry of the UI update to the latest again, which is acting normally and shows eSIM stuff.

eSim management

The 1GB profile that came with the card didn’t need setup; it works out of the box.

I added the Roamless PAYGO profile for use as a fallback SIM (AT&T and T-Mobile) to the main carrier (Verizon). Basically this was uploading the QR code from the laptop. It hung at 90% for about a minute – this worried me because some bugs in 2024 had caused crashes at 90%. But no, it completed the setup and Roamless was now the selected eSIM profile.

Note: there appear to be three requirements for having the eSIM Management feature function:

1. have supporting firmware <- won’t show at all without this
2. have the eSIM loaded in the slot <- won’t show at all without this
3. and have that slot be the active slot <- says no eSim present without this.

putting router on the network

At this point I transferred over the main carrier sim and confirmed the connection. Then I changed the glinet’s default 192.168.8.1 IP to the local one I use on my network.

moving over /etc/config/repeater

I had a lot of stored AP’s in the Opal and didn’t want to lose them. Found them stored in /etc/config/repeater and scp‘ed them over to the new router. They show up perfectly under the repeater menu.

removing old equipment

After I confirmed the new setup was working 100% I packed up the Cudy and the Opal WiFi router for donation to some larval geek I meet on the road.

where is the antenna?

The Proxicast antenna arrived in Livingston today. I’ll have it remailed to a USPS as discussed above on my way out of Los Alamos. Then install it in Santa Fe. This will allow me to hide the router away over the cab.

In the meantime the Spitz is doing a fine job hanging from the sun visor like the Cudy before it.

1. It took me about an hour to realize that the flash (or image) wasn’t working right. Symptoms: no eSIM management stuff, problems connecting to the Verizon network with the same settings as the Cudy, LUCI and linux login not synced with UI. ↩