Being WANTED is better than being forgotten. Besides if they catch you. You will get free medical, room & board...i2f

I should have thought about that before I had surgery last year I bet the accomodations were about the same

I've got the wifi up and working. I went from having all weak signals to about a dozen strong ones. Works well. Not the most user friendly but not that hard.

Glad to hear you got that up and running. True... not the most user friendly...

I found that I usually just set it up to a network once I got into an anchorage or dock and left it on that network the whole time.

First, WiFi is supposed to be limited to 200 mW in the US at least. However, given a fairly low interference area, you can get pretty serious distances with that limitation.

Keeping the coax cable as short as possible is a good idea, as that can often offset any gain from an amplified antenna.

I've used a 1 watt amp (on top of a 200mW radio) with a 6 foot, 9dB gain, omni antenna several miles out and had perfect signals.

While 200mW is great for the dock, it doesn't address the needs of someone anchored out or underway coastal cruising.

We sell commercial wireless backbones that are capped at 750mw. With highly directional antennas, coverage is easily a 1/2 mile to a laptop's internal antenna. As Sully mentioned, it can be much further. I've never tested the distance, as I got tired of walking!

Different vendors spec their xmitters differently.

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Rick in Florida

Catalac 8M twin yanmar diesels
Catalac Catamaran info Site

Using Cisco Aironet PCMCIA 802.11g cards, and two parabolic grid 18dB gain dish antennas, we once setup a 7.3 mile link. This was done out in the mountains near Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

You can get some serious range out of the stuff....a boat complicates it since you can't use as high a gain an antenna, due to the boat being moving platform.

I thought that the FCC Part 15 rules permit a Maximum Transmitter Power Output of 1.0 watt or 30dBm

Could be, I never looked it up.

With the new equipment it's more about, mesh technology, antenna gain and auto directivity. They receive a signal from a computer network card and reconfigure internal antennas for maximum gain. They also can poll other repeaters on the backhaul and select the one with the strongest signal. The backhauls are now completely wireless. They receive their network connections from "roots"s via radio. There's a tutorial on our business website if anyone is interested.

It's actually pretty slick and I have lots of fun playing with them.

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Rick in Florida

Catalac 8M twin yanmar diesels
Catalac Catamaran info Site

Now using an engeinius EUB 362 with an amplifier. works really well. Signal strength went from 7 db all the way up to 18 db. And that is with a very bad coax connection. When I put the crimp on connection and shorten the coax it should be alot better.

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"Money is not the only thing one has to spend; the other thing is life. The difference is that you never know how much is in the bank, or what your balance is. Your life is your inheritance. As soon as you realize this, you start trying to spend your life wisely." - From "Advice to the Sealorn" by Herb Payson.