For the past 25 years I have run seminars on long distance voyaging and although I wish I had more time to do offshore passages we have covered topics on almost everything from safety at sea to entering foreign ports. When I lived back in the south coast of England we would organize a couple of trips each year where we would take a flotilla of boats across the channel to France. This for many of the participants was there first time going 'foreign' and led many of them to take longer trips or at the very least give them the confidence to go back and cross the channel by themselves at some later date. Twenty years ago few people had cell phones, WiFi, the internet, Facebook, streaming video and all the other stuff people seem unable to do without these days had not been invented and many of the questions that I was asked centered around entry requirements, where to get water and ice when you got there and other such fundamentals. Oh how times have changed and now the leading question is frequently where the nearest hot spot is and whether there is cell phone service. It seems that WiFi is an almost essential ingredient of life aboard these days. Now I admit that I do work for myself and rely on my cell phone for clients, editors and others to contact me but I do feel a sense of freedom when on those rare occasions that I am out of cell range or I just leave my phone off for the day or weekend.
Many coffee shops, boat yards and marinas now offer free WiFi to their guests but if you are tied up some way from the source the signal is often less than stellar with frequent drop outs a common problem. Some sort of WiFi extender or amplifier is thus a therefore a good idea to overcome these problems. Not knowing much about this stuff I asked around and spent a good deal of time on the internet researching what was the best way to bring WiFi signal aboard. That search bought me to the Rogue Wave WiFi which I got last year. Set up was easy and I clamped the antenna to one of the rails on the fly bridge the cable from the antenna connects to a router and within a few minutes I had the whole shebang up and working. I am the first to admit that I am far from a computer geek but following the instructions set up is easy. Power for the system comes either from a 12 volt supply or if AC power is available from a plug in cell phone type transformer power is not supplied from the computer. LED lights on the antenna itself light up to show the incoming signal strength and also give an indication that the unit is receiving power. With that done you simply log in to a 'Network Scan Page' which shows the names and signal strengths of in range WiFi signals. Other boxes indicate if these are closed private networks but I found that in many places I was able to grab a free signal from even several miles away.
This truly is a remarkable bit of kit and for folks like me that spend a lot of time living a working aboard, a godsend. My friend Ben Ellison also had good things to say about the Rogue Wave too so it seems I made the right choice.
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