Does the MAX BR1 encrypt the traffic going to a public (RV Park) WI-FI?
Is the SSID WPA2/WPA3 protected or no password?.
If there is a password then the traffic is protected against casual snooping, you can google about WPA protections against listening attacks and what weaknesses it has.
Larger public wi-fi networks like xfinitywifi are unencrypted, and if you are a client of XFINITY you can switch your MAX router to use WPA2 Enterprise to securely connect to the XFINITY SSID.
If people want instructions on how to unpack the .mobileconfig to view your account specific username and password let me know.
No, your Peplink does not magically add encryption if the network is not using any over the air security, but as Paul points out all WPA2 PSK would do is prevent someone casually from sniffing packets over the air and capturing your traffic and WPA3 or a .1X based system would be needed to enhance that side of things.
That just deals with the over the air traffic between your devices and the AP in your Peplink, if you are using WiFi WAN to an open network there is no encryption used there (ignoring for now cases where WPA3-SAE is employed as I highly doubt you’re going to find that in an RV parks public network in almost all cases at the moment).
As for the topic of your post - “safe” in what sense, what are you aiming to “protect” yourself from here or what are your perceived issues?
Let’s consider some of the FUD around the use of public wifi networks in this context and get straight to the point that within reason the vast majority of your traffic (I would suspect pretty much all of it) is almost certainly using some form of TLS between you and whatever remote server is involved and is encrypted in that sense.
If you care about the local network operator seeing what type of traffic, and where you are connecting to then you could consider using SFC or hosting a FusionHub somewhere and using that to encrypt your traffic so that all the local network operator would see is the tunnel and its destination address.
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So I should use a VPN (like Surfshark)when connecting to a public WIFI as WAN
Yes, using VPN (e.g. Surfshark) will encrypt your traffic, but you will need to use it on every device (Phone, laptop, tablet ,etc) which you connector to the MAX BR1.
Another option is to use SpeedFusion Connect which will encrypt your traffic on any WAN (Cellular or Wi-Fi) so that all your devices traffic is encrypted.