LandfallVoyages

Recently we realized that in order to continue to thrill and entertain you, our illustrious audience, we needed better Internet connections in strange places. Not strange places in us, perv, us in strange places. First was a failed attempt with a USB dongle that ended in disaster and me yelling at Radio Shack employees. Next was coitus interruptus with a small indoor wifi booster that didn’t work very well at first and then even less after a couple of swims. We realized that it was time to step up ($$$) to the big leagues, a proper marine wifi antenna and booster.
There are several options available and none are cheap. Most of them had other drawbacks as well. Several were USB which sounds like a plus at first unless you ever want to have an Internet connection in two places on your vessel at once and then the drawbacks begin to show. Nobody that I found makes a router that will interface with USB so installing your own wifi hotspot gets really complicated ($$$) really fast.

Island Time PC makes a unit called Island Time WIFI that sounded great. It uses a Ubiquit Bullet booster which is simple and waterproof, coupled to a marine antenna and has a really nice selection of mount options. At $249.00 it isn’t cheap but one of the less expensive options nonetheless. I could have assembled the same thing on my own for less money, heck, all I’d need is a Bullet and an antenna and some self-sealing silicone tape and then make a mount and get some external cat5e cable and the ends for it and the special pliers and some more interior cat5e cable and more ends and a POE injector and the plug for it and the extra special rubber crispy end for the bullet and make a mount a then get Tamiko to write the software for the booster, no problem, and I could have saved over fifty bucks! Yeah, you get the point, this setup is a pretty good deal.
Installation was basic. I mounted it to a existing vertical pole on our solar panel arch, drilled one hole for the cable to enter the boat, and led the cable forward under the deck plates towards our router. Under the router I zip-tied the POE injector to some existing wires and ran the small power wires through a bulkhead to a bus bar for 12v power, plugged in the indoor cat5e cable and we were in business, almost.

Island time uses Linux. Linux is great if you love screwing around with fiddley little software BS at all hours of the night, drinking Mountain Dew and eating Dortios in Mother’s basement, but I don’t. I think that they used Linux because it’s really small but I prefer software designed for dummies in a hurry. Yes, I AM a dummy in a hurry and there are more of us than you, dorkboy, so stop it. I digress.

After some fiddling we found that we had 38 total networks to choose from where before we had 5. Now THAT is impressive. 5 of the were unsecured and all of a sudden, FREE INTERNET! YAY! Most of the networks were named something predictable like coral st house, NETGEAR, Smith Family, wf45hdg63′ whatever. But one really stuck out from the crowd, as it were. We all laughed as we read–
STOP BANGING JANELLE.