#413 Road Trip

This week I returned to my home office after two weeks on the road. My husband and I wanted to escape the late summer heat and explore the Oregon coast, so we decided to test working from our RV while on the road. In order to work on the road, we signed up for Starlink Unlimited Mobile and planned to use that for internet access. Overall I’d say it passed the test, but we’d need some adjustments before we’d do it again. Here is what we learned…

When Starlink works, it’s great…but it is limited, especially when you are camping in the forest among the beautiful, TALL redwoods. Starlink needs 110 degrees of clear sky and to point a certain direction based on your location. In one spot we had clear sky to the NE of us, but Starlink needed to point NW and was completely blocked by trees (even on top of our RV there were too many obstructions).

Starlink needs the standard 120v AC power. This was fine when our camp site had electrical hook-ups. If we wanted to dry camp (no hook-ups) we needed to run the generator in order to use it, since the RV house battery only provides 12v power. We had to stick to camp sites with hook-ups on work days for this trip.

Our RV isn’t huge. It is 25’ so plenty big for the two of us, but it can start to feel pretty cramped when it is raining outside and we both have to work inside all day. We lucked out with only one day of rain and managed to get through a few simultaneous video calls with the help of the mute button. Not ideal, but we managed. Our goal was to escape the heat, so I certainly wasn’t going to complain about one day of rain!

We both agreed we’d like to do more trips like this, but as I said, we will need to make some adjustments before that happens.

First, I’d buy an external battery that we can plug into that is separate from our RV house battery. This would allow for more dry camping while having Starlink and our laptops plugged in throughout the day.

Second, we need a reliable backup for Starlink. We will keep Starlink (their mobile service makes it convenient to start and stop your subscription), but we will need another option when we don’t have a clear sky. We love camping in the forest…that doesn’t work so well with Starlink.

I’m happy to be home and settled back into my normal routine, but it will be fun to plan another road trip. We are thinking Montana and/or Wyoming…plenty of big open sky out there!!

We had a dip in monthly new web users that we will watch as we head into the fall season.

…had a mid-cycle demo day from the product team. Always fun to see what is in the works!

…updated support pages to include Integration Settings, including Roles on Parabol and Managing your Organization.

…audited our marketing workflows in prep for some new experiments.

…review reflections from our Trimester Company Retro in prep for our upcoming strategic planning.