My April β24 in Review
New month, new monthly review. This time for April. And a short review, because not much exciting has happened.
April finally saw the long-awaited tidying up of the apartment I grew up in but moved out of over two years ago. It had been unoccupied since then, but was still full of clutter. Contrary to expectations, we actually managed to empty all the cupboards and drawers and decide on everything that had accumulated over more than twenty years: Throw it away, take it with us, “sell it, give it away or if nobody wants it, throw it away”. What is still missing is a kind of flea market, in the hope of giving as much of the furniture from the apartment a second life as possible (and having to take as little as possible to the landfill myself). The apartment also needs to be renovated before it can be rented out.
In the meantime, I still have to find a place for the things I’ve taken with me in my two current apartments (and tidy up there first). I also need to digitize a few more video tapes, but also look through photo prints, negatives and slides and digitize special pictures so that they only take up digital storage and no longer take up physical space. So there shouldn’t be any boredom in the near future…
Apart from that, it was just normal work and everyday stress, interrupted only by a vacation weekend in the Taunus (🇩🇪).
I finally found the perfect 5G router setup!
I have written a lot already about my search for the perfect 5G router. It’s time for a new update, as I think I have finally found a great solution.
The last state was that I used the ZTE MC801A as a modem for the GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000). That was the setup for a few months, and it worked fine, even though I was unable to use 5G Standalone, which was enabled by my provider last year. And the use of two separate devices was also not that optimal. Especially since the MC801A had some quirks:
In the last few months, it randomly decided to disconnect twice, but I wasn’t able to reconnect it without being in my second flat. This was anything else than optimal for a router in a remote location.
So this month, I decided to buy the GL.iNet 5G module board (GL-M2) including the Quectel modem (RM520N-GL) directly out of China. A few days later, the FedEx package arrived, and now I was finally able to connect it.
And it works perfectly (so far)!
Just one extended router instead of using another router as the modem. I can finally decide which network mode to use (LTE, 5G NSA or 5G SA). I can directly configure the modem from the Beryl AX interface. And it’s a lot cheaper (as long as I can sell the MC801A again) than the Spitz AX, which packages both into one enclosure.
Let’s hope this setup turns out to be stable in the future. π
Should I find a cheap place to 3D print, I might print a case for the module board. But that’s just aesthetics, it’s the inner values that count the most.
