As a cost effective alternative to the famous RedBox I have put together some bits and pieces of scripts and settings to make a
wifi to
wifi gateway.
Needless to say, the RexBox can do far more than this simple gateway function.
The box will provide wifi onboard when the shore connections is too weak to be us any use on board. Using an external USB high gain
antenna a usable connection can be make to a hotspot/wifi provider ashore.
A range of different wifi antennas exist and most of these comes with a USB connected wifi device. The Raspberry Pi uses this external USB wifi device and forward the connection (network address translation, NAT) to a local wifi
network onboard.
Our
boat is an
Ovni and the metal
hull shields most
radio waves so wifi does not really penetrate into the
cabin and for us this little box will be very handy.
It's
documented and all code are on
github.
I have good experience with the
antenna showed linked to in the text, but I have also tried Yagi antennas with about 20dB gain. Very directive, but if you're moored longside etc it can yield excellent results even when the shore wifi hotspot are quite far away.
Regards,
Ole
S/Y Algol