Does anyone have any advice or experience with Rogue Wave or The Wirie

[aBoatNamedTramp]

Hi, we've recently bought a boat and I'm hoping to continue to work along the way but need to have good and reliable internet. We are in Langkawi and will be making our way around South East Asia en route to Australia and beyond. We have free wifi via the marina which is flaky. Plus we have a local data package which also is weak.

Some one brought Rogue Wave to my attention so I've been researching it and alternatives. Does anybody have any experience here to share?

[hasse_A]

We bought The Wirie a year ago and find the aluminium bracket corroding.
See picture.

Apart from that the The Wirie itself stopped working a few months ago.
You could connect to it but got no signal from any hotspot when connecting.
Signal strength = -255 DBm.

Yesterday I decided to dismantle the antenna and when unscrewing the white antenna case there came flushing out salt water. The lower threads of the antenna cover has no seal so off course water can penetrate the antenna.
See picture of corroded inside of the antenna.

After warming the interior of the antenna with a heat gun and drying it out the antenna, The Wirie startet working the way it should.

I would say that The Wirie is obviously not made for marine environment.
After the antenna has dried out I will seal it and hopefully it will work for a while.

I would not buy this antenna again.

[kiltym]

We are sorry you are disappointed in The Wirie, but would love to understand the issues a bit further as some of what you wrote is not clear to us.

Re: the aluminum saddle clamp.

Yes, there is some corrosion, and yes there may be some. That component is 1" thick and will not fail because of some surface corrosion between the saddle clamp and the bracket. We have been using this same component for 7+ years with no failures. You can easily clean off the surface corrosion (which you would not ever see from an aesthetic perspective when the unit is mounted).

Re: the WiFi antenna

This part is a bit confusing to us. You state you disassembled the radome portion of the WiFi antenna, and salt water came out.

My questions are these:
1) Assuming the antenna was mounted vertical, and you claim water came out when you took it apart, it implies water must have entered from the top of the antenna (not the threads as you claim). If water entered from the threads (the bottom of the antenna), it would have simply drained back out (if water can get in, it can certainly get back out). But it didn't, it was trapped in there implying a leak from some other location on the antenna. If this is the case, we would love to discuss it directly to see if we can resolve it with our warranty. The antenna should not leak, and if yours did, it was a defect in that antenna.

2) You state it was salt water. How could salt water get inside that antenna when mounted vertically some height above your boat? That in itself is a bit confusing to us. Even if splashed from a wave, and water was forced in through the threads at the bottom, it would have leaked back out. So I am back to not being clear as to where the water actually came from, but I am not convinced it got in via the threads at the bottom of the antenna. It seems much more likely it was rain water that entered the antenna from the top of the antenna (which certainly is still an issue).

3) The photo of the antenna is not 100% clear, but all I can make out is some very minor green corrosion on the copper, which is just surface corrosion and would not cause the issue you had. Certainly the radome with some level of water inside may have caused issues like you stated. I am glad the antenna is working properly again, which to me, if it was sitting in salt water for months, is actually a testament to the marine grade quality of the antenna. The antenna elements looks very good for months of salt water immersion.

We are sorry for your disappointment, and we are happy to discuss any of this further directly if you like. But we would prefer not to continue the conversion on this forum.