Mobile Hotspot

[billk9989]

Lol! Got it. I set mine to manual - ready for anything now.

 

[billk9989]

Traveling cross country, 4 day trip. I’m having a problem. I have two SD cards. I power off the unit at the end of the day, take the SD card out so that I can send videos to the family at night. Then I put the other card in and re-plug the power and rear camera so that I can have the unit recording during the night; I push the button to turn on the wi-fi. The camera will not connect to the mobile hotspot, no matter what I try. The mobile hotspot is operating fine. Then I try to connect my phone to the Blackvue wi-fi. It won’t take my password. Next morning I put the first SD card back into the camera and fiddle with it and it finally works. In the meantime I’m not able to do live viewing of during the night, nor do I get notifications - a security concern. I’ve done this twice, so I know that the first one wasn’t a fluke. Am I using an incorrect procedure to get the unit working and connected, with the second SD card?

 

[KANNINA 2.0]

Traveling cross country, 4 day trip. I’m having a problem. I have two SD cards. I power off the unit at the end of the day, take the SD card out so that I can send videos to the family at night. Then I put the other card in and re-plug the power and rear camera so that I can have the unit recording during the night; I push the button to turn on the wi-fi. The camera will not connect to the mobile hotspot, no matter what I try. The mobile hotspot is operating fine. Then I try to connect my phone to the Blackvue wi-fi. It won’t take my password. Next morning I put the first SD card back into the camera and fiddle with it and it finally works. In the meantime I’m not able to do live viewing of during the night, nor do I get notifications - a security concern. I’ve done this twice, so I know that the first one wasn’t a fluke. Am I using an incorrect procedure to get the unit working and connected, with the second SD card?

You're doing it right so far as I know.

Only way to power these down is to pull the cable at the cam or let it shut itself down via battery protection. Plug it back in to power up again. I always do it with car off, just to be safe. Can't say I know if it matters or not.

Usually when I unplug mine, the car's been sitting long enough that the cam's already shut itself off, and not recording in parking mode.

Definitely seems card-related based on your observation.

Are you reformatting the card each time you pull video off of it before you put it back in? I rotate 4 cards, swap in a new one every 90 days. Every time I put the next one in I freshly format it. No problems so far. I've read that deleting files off of SD cards (vs. copying) can monkey with allocation tables on it and make dashcams do odd things.

The only other thing I can think of is that you may have unplugged your cam while it was recording in parking mode and caused file corruption in that one card. Reformatting with the BV Viewer software on your computer before you replace it should sort that.

I'm sure others will chime in, but trying to reformat or replacing the problem card are about all I can come up with.

 

[billk9989]

Thanks. Well, that fixed it, although I have no idea why…

 

[billk9989]

I have the Verizon 15 gb/mo plan for my mobile hotspot. For the last month I’ve kept my 900X wifi connected to the hotspot, 24x7. I have not used any remote features of the dashcam, such as live viewing. I have not viewed the contents of the SD card. I get a few notifications of a door closing (Impact Detected - why in the hell can’t they set this dashcam up with Parking Mode mode delayed for a minute or so after the ignition is turned-off?). That is all. All of my in-home and mobile devices are set so that there is no auto-join to the mobile hotspot. We have not joined the hotspot a single time this month.

After 30 days all of my plan is used up. That’s 500 mb/day. (I’m beginning to think that my neighbor has figure out my passcode, lol.) I know that I must have some sort of problem with a setting. But I don’t know what it is. Any ideas?

 

[Ukraine Visitor]

OK, so, if you say you have 15GB/mo and after the month is over it's all used up, then what's the problem? Wasn't using your plan the reason why you got it? In particular, wasn't it because you wanted to use 15GB/mo the reason you ordered 15GB/mo? You are either not providing all the information or I am missing something.

 

[billk9989]

This was a test, to see how much cellular data the dashcam uses, in the absence of any other cellular activity. I plan to use the hotspot when we travel for normal internet activity.

 

[StrayCam]

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This was a test, to see how much cellular data the dashcam uses, in the absence of any other cellular activity. I plan to use the hotspot when we travel for normal internet activity.

billk9989-

I hope you're doing well with your dashcam/hotspot. I learned a lot from this thread... thanks to you and the contributors to this thread!

I've seen people say they only use 2-4 gb of data with similar set-ups, so you raising the question as to why your usage was 15 gb is not out of hand. I'm sure you have figured it out by now.

Just curious... are you still using the same set-up... Mifi 8100L etc...? Is all going well with it?

 

[billk9989]

Hi straycam,

Yes, I am using the same setup. And I like it a lot! I did find the problem. We have a lot of devices - Apple Watches, ipads, phones, computer. The car sits in the garage, and a number of these devices are in the range of the Verizon hotspot. Before I posted my problems with excess data use I had gone around the house and turned off auto join on all of our devices. Or so I thought. Turns out that two of them still were set to auto-join. I don’t know how this happened, as I made a specific effort to do this and I did it with each and every device. On the second pass I found the two that were still connected and, as they say, the rest is history. The way that I learned that there was leakage was simple, just looked at the number of devices connected to the hotspot and was pretty shocked. Now the only thing that’s connected is the Blackvue and data use is minimal, per expectations.