Posting this prior to purchase and pursuit to see if anyone has thoughts on whether this (crazy?) idea would work or not:
What if I setup a Raspberry Pi as a wireless hotspot, with its primary internet a Sixfab LTE HAT, but install Pi-Hole on it and add a battery to the thing so it can serve as a roaming adblocked modem. The goal would be to provide Adblocking on the go to cellphones (that might be a bit faster with less to load), plus reduced cellular plan cost by not having a contract on my phone at all, instead using wifi to connect to the RPi for on-the-go internet usage.
I’ve pretty much done this using RaspAP, the sixfab UPS, and Pi-Hole w/unbound. Totally feasible. Used a Google Fi sim in QMI mode. Ran pretty flawlessly for about 2 years.
My set up for my off grid cabin. The cellular hat and modem are under the UPS. Only way I could get it to fit without separating the battery from the rest of the UPS.
Yeah pretty much Sixfab everything (I’m obviously a fan) cellular hat and UPS, and using a Telit910 here… There really isn’t much to it besides the order in which you do things I’ve found. First things first is to set up your cellular connection (using SixFabs tutorials in either ECM or QMI. I opted for QMI because it’s easier to automate, otherwise if you lose connection with ECM you have to go into serial and ECM=1,0 every time. Then install RaspAp (you can do this yourself with hostapd but RaspAp makes everything so easy and has a web-gui to manage connections (hotspot settings, DHCP, routing tables, metrics) RaspAP also has an opt-in adblock, while not as comprehensive as Pi-Hole with reg-ex and stuff works pretty well. I’m out of state right now but when I get back I’ll put together some notes for you.
