Cruising with Wifi

San Cristobal Galapagos

I am sure this will be a continuing subject as we meander our way try across the globe, but I thought this was a fine time for an update on our Wifi system. Generally I have been VERY pleased with our wifi system. The Port Networks 250 pulls in signals at great range and seems to do fine with a fair amount of rocking and rolling. Wifi availability has been pretty good. We had excellent wifi in Cartegena, both in the anchorage from Club Nautico ($) and in our marina from Club de Pesca (free). The San Blas had ZERO coverage, but they barely had electricity so no surprises there. We were connected in Panama at Shelter Bay ($) and on a mooring at Balboa (included with mooring) in Panama City. The Las Perlas were a dead zone as we were near uninhabited islands, but we got service from the Tropic Star Lodge (free) in Bahia Pinas at the southern border of Panama. Coverage was good in La Libertad around the Puerto Lucia Yacht Club (included with dockage) as well as in Bahia de Caracas from the Puerto Amistad Yacht Club (included with mooring). In Bahia we even could pull in several signals when anchored a few miles out waiting for high tide and our Pilot, but they all were either locked or MAC address restricted.

Here in San Cristobal in the Galapagos, the City has free wifi (see screen shot above) throughout the Malecon (boardwalk) and it reaches quite well the half mile out to the anchorage, coming in stronger than the onboard Linksys router (probably due to the fact the linksys is mounted about 3" above the waterline and the Port Networks antenna is 15 feet off the water while only separated by 25'). In fact, we started pulling in working wifi 9 miles from town (see screen shot below) and more than 2.5 miles from the nearest land as we came down the western side of the island. In the Harbor I can still see that same AP (verified by mac address) I picked up 9 miles out, though there are others closer by with better signal strength. They certainly have some high powered access points here, but it is still amazing that I am getting at least 4.5 miles of working range (and maybe more) while underway at sea.

Almost universally, this is a connection shared between MANY boaters and sometimes many on shore as well, so it tends to get slow from about 10 am till 10 pm. Generally at night the connections are decent with maybe 40 to 50 kbps pretty normal. Many of these have firewalls blocking useful services and websites (blogs seem to get mislabeled as adult content quite often) though sometimes you can get around that by not using their DNS servers and inputting your own. It will be interesting to see how the coverage compares as we head west and further from civilization. I will keep up with some occasional updates for others to reference as they follow in our wake.

Air Conditioning

Cartegena Colombia - 10 24.5N 075 32.6W

Well, Chuck wins the bet....and it took less than two weeks. After two sleepless nights due to extreme heat and no wind and stories of the San Blas being even hoter at times I managed to procure a used Air Conditioning unit from our friend David on Brudair. I had originally wanted to bring down a dehumidifier, becoming a believer in their cooling and comfort factor in Hawaii, but we weren't sure if it would fit, so it didn't make the list. I tried to find one here, but no-one even knew what they were and the only units I found were very small "mini" units. It appears they either have Fans or A/C here in Colombia. I then looked everywhere for a portable air conditioning unit. They are like window units, but the whole unit sits in the room (on wheels...hence the portable part) and they use a duct (or preferably two) to pump the hot air out a window. This would be a much easier install than trying to fit a window unit to a flat hatch. I did finally find a place that has some on order, but he didn't know when they would get there and the price was rather steep at over $600 for a 9,000 btu unit (this would be about $300 in the US).

I knew David had a 16,000 Btu unit for sale, trying to make space as they are now using a window unit into their butterfly hatch, so I went about determining if it would fit. After many careful measurements I determined that it would fit under the sink in the galley and we could use the SW intake for the sink spigot as the supply and drain out the deck drain using a left over SS "Y" fitting we had in our spares box. Wiring would be easy as the AC panel is right there. Short term we would just run the duct-work out the cabinet which would probably need to be open for proper air supply and long term, we could put a louvered vent out the inboard face below the AC panel and put louvers in the door or kickstop for return air.

It took about 2 1/2 hours on Saturday to take the AC unit out of Brudair, complicated as the foam pad had bonded to the wood platform pretty well over the 5 years it had been installed. I then spent about an hour cleaning the unit and strainer on the dock. Here I made a minor mistake that would come back later.

Sunday morning I got started at 7:00 installing the system. The strainer ended up fitting in the back of the cabinet mounted to the plexiglass separator, with the pump just forward of that and the main unit outboard. I had to relocate the fire extinguisher within the cabinet and relieved the water filter bracket with my dremel to make the fit easier. By 2:00, just 5 hours later, the unit was up and running, producing cold air. I had the crew of Silandra V over for drinks to celebrate the accomplishment and then sat down for a movie. About halfway through, at 8:30 or so the unit shut off with a high pressure alarm, which is usually caused by insufficient cooling. I tried a few things, checking the strainer and things, but couldn't figure it out and was getting tired and gave up at about 9:45. The next morning I tried a few things, eventually finding two small muscle shells in the pump that must have gotten past the strainer when I was cleaning it. I figure they took a while to work their way into the pump, explaining why it ran fine for over 6 hours. It worked the ramainder of monday evening and overnight, allowing me to sleep in comfort, even requiring a sheet over me for the first time in weeks.

I went about trying to figure out the power consumption today, but it appears our electric meter (on the dock) isn't operational. I know it uses about 3 kW when running, but don't have a great idea of what that means over 24 hours or so. The bad news is I don't know how much power it uses over time, but the good news is I guess we aren't paying $.25 US per kW since the meter doesn't work. It will be interesting to see what the marina does when we go to check out, but I think we are fairly safe.

The rents show up Wednesday afternoon, so I will finally have some company. Today is a holiday here (no-one knows what the holiday is, but much is closed and noone is working). Hopefully the Stainless polishers will finish tomorrow so I can wash the deck Wednesday morning (it will be covered in dust from the polishing and being in this city) before Bill and Mom get here.

Trip Preparations

Well it has been WAY too long, but I have been WAY too busy to keep the blog updated.

Since you last heard from me I sprained my ankle, went to France for a wonderful vacation, and then got hard to work getting the boat ready for the trip. 3 weeks of 12 hour days later and my long list is coming to a close. The short version is we got the bottom painted, running gear serviced, and the rig painted. While that was being done by the yard I tore down, cleaned inspected and re-assembled the rigging, added a masthead antenna for AIS (see more below) installed the Iridium Openport system on a custom spreader mount and installed a matching mount for a future Fleet Broadband system we will be testing when it is released. Onboard many items were installed, repaired, or tinkered with including a nice new Dive Compressor and this week I have been putting the finishing touches on things such as foredeck locks and equipment stowage. More on all that in coming weeks, but today I will talk a bit further about AIS.

The system is now fully installed with the masthead antenna and I am very pleased with the results. Even in a "noisy" environment like Newport I can pick up ships 30 to 40 miles out and can also see that I am broadcasting well using MarineTraffic.com's AIS viewer.

Below is a screen grab from the delivery from Cove Haven Marina in Barrington back to our the Newport Harbor Hotel & Marina.


Pretty cool I think, and very nice to know you are transmitting and being seen by the big boys.

There's a Hole in my Cockpit, Dear Liza

Earl got a great start in my absence at the end of the week, cutting the "soft patch" hole in the cockpit cutting back the foam core and filling with thickened epoxy. It makes getting into and out of the boat a little difficult, right now, but he hopes to have the G-10 spigot in place tomorrow and then we can lay the patch back in place and wait until the teak comes to cover all this up.

AIS, This and That

I installed our new ACR Nauticast B AIS-300 over the weekend. The GPS cable is run to Laz aft, but not yet up the Radar post and VHF antenna is sitting in the cabin irradiating my head instead of at the masthead, but the unit works great just as we saw coming back from Bermuda with Ben (Panbo Article). The screen shot (click for larger view) is how the targets are displayed in Expedition. You can see the two Narragansett Bay Pilot boats across the Harbor and a CG boat out in the mouth of the bay. Our new version of The Cap'n is on its way and I am excited to see how it displays the targets.

Other weekend projects (after building an oven on Friday night) included relocating the Raymarine Life Tag base unit to the pilothouse for better coverage of the cockpit (it used to false alarm a bit too much when located at the Nav Station) as well as re-installation of the Water-maker pump after Ocean-Options replaced the pump and I re-painted the motor. The watermaker is now making almost 30 gal/hr where it was only making 15 gal/hr before the pump replacement.

One and two half jobs checked off the list....eventually I will get there.

New Wifi and Computer System Update

I finally got all my tools and parts back from Shane in Florida and got a decent day on Saturday to finish the wifi install. The new WiFi antenna is the white one on the right (furthest outboard). I ended up needing an antenna extender since there was just no way to get the LMR-400-UF SMA connector down inside the hoop. Luckily West had all I needed in stock so I was able to finish before snow flew last night....thank god. I sure wouldn't have wanted to be climbing on my rather precarious ladder arrangement in the snow. It is quite difficult finding a location in a cockpit to place a 8' stepladder. In the spring I will need to re-rig my ladder in order to install a GPS antenna opposite the WiFi antenna on another Edson Rail Mount for the AIS unit we plan to install.

The Port Networks MWB-250 system by Alan Spicer Marine Telcom is working superbly. Looking at the site survey on the left (click for bigger), you can see signals about 1.5 miles away (Sail Newport) in a rather "Noisy" environment of downtown Newport.


Further long distance testing will have to take place in the future when there aren't sooooo many signals, but my initial reaction is that the system works quite well and is very easy to use. In the few minutes I played last night, I was able to connect to several access points around town, most of which aren't visible on my laptop even when in the pilothouse or out on deck.

The MWB-250 unit which is located in the pilothouse with a Power over Ethernet (POE) equiped Cat-5e cable connecting it to a POE injector and then to the Linksys WRT54GL router running an open source firmware DD-WRT. A LED equiped switch is located in the back of the desk flip-top to allow turning off the WiFi reciever to save power offshore as it runs on the same circuit as the Cell Phone Booster and Globalstar SatCom.

I love this router and firmware for its low cost, high power, and extreme flexibility. There is a great community providing support and sample scripts to allow many customizations such as multiple WAN ports and data shaping. I can certainly recommend Alan Spicer and Port Networks to any interested in a high powered WiFi system with a remote radio. If you are very savvy, you could probably buy direct from Port Networks and put together the antenna, cable, connectors, etc yourself, but if you want some direction, Alan's services and in particular his service contracts (which he is supplying to my client Shane) can be indispensable. With the service contract, he was incredibly price competitive on the parts.

I am also in the process of upgrading our computer system with a new Nav computer, moving the Nav computer over to Communications work and moving the 8 year old Com computer off the boat for Home Theater use. I will update on this and our entire onboard computer system in the near future.

WiFi Take 1

I quickly set up the new WiFi system in the apartment last night so that I could start to play with the system and see how it works. Short answer is quite well. To the right is the list of wifi AP's in the neighborhood, over twice what either my Linksys WRT-54gL (quite the powerhouse really) or my laptop sees and I was able to connect via the open "motorola 491" network with a rather weak -91 signal strength. Other handy features include a live signal meter that is meant for use to aim a directional antenna, or quite helpful to determine how viable a connection really is instead of the snapshot of a site survey.

More once I get the chance to set it up onboard...hopefully next weekend.

A Beautiful Cloud of Sail

It was a glorious downwind sail to Monhegan with barely a cloud in the sky. We got some good use and practice with the new Spinnaker/Whisker pole.