he's talking about the marina's wifi, not 3/4g that costs monthly. His idea is when for docked, not out on open water.

That's crazy expensive and huge. I have 3 wifi antennas in 2 locations. One on my roof here at my townhouse and two at work.

By far the best product today to handle this is:

http://www.compusa.com/applications/Sea ... &CatId=372

It's made by Ubiquiti. The best part is.. you can put that up high, route the cat5 down to a wireless router, and serve that signal out to everyone on your boat.

Very easy setup.

If you want to do better then that, for about $150 you can make one device that can do both connect to the wifi at the marina, and then create your own hotspot with a password for you and your friends that serves out that internet locally.

So if I understand correctly, I can mount one of those on my radar arch, run an ethernet cable from it to a wireless router, plug it into the WAN port and serve up my own boat network (from the wireless router) which get's it's internet access from my marina's WIFI? Sort of like a setup at home but instead of a model from the satelite company, I use this device connected to my marina WIFI.

Is that right? If so, that's just what I've been looking for.

Steve.

Correct. I do this at home. It originally started where I used the antenna system as a wireless hotspot for my neighborhood. Range was 1/4 to 1/2 mile with all the trees, etc. Not bad. THEN I got the bright idea since I have a giant antenna on my roof, why am I paying $70 for internet when I can see over 50 open routers? So I reversed the system (to a setup that you need) and turned it into a powered antenna. I configured the equipment to "client" mode and connect it to a good strong/fast open router. Then just pluged that into the WAN port of my wireless router inside.


That was setup #1 on my roof using an older/bigger ubiquiti product and 8db antenna.

My setup #2 now goes. I run "DD-WRT" on the access point, a 3rd party firmware. It allows me to add virtual wifi interfaces. So I setup one interface as the "client" to connect to the wireless hotspot in the area, then I created virtual "access point" to re-transmit the signal with my own name and password which is basically repeating the signal and allows me to control who get's on my nice fresh/strong wifi. One piece of equipment, one thing to manage. In the setup you can also assign the port on the Picostation as a "switch" and use that to feed internet to another switch inside the boat if you need cat5 connectivity, otherwise you just need to run cat5 to the picostation and plug that into it's POE injector somewhere.
Here's the directions how to install DDWRT on it. I've had a picostation outside here in Florida now for 2 years in our wind/rain, works flawlessly. I can even get you some screen shots at home of the configuration pages how to do it.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ub ... NS5/LSX%29