Bob-
Thanks! I did not realize that the option to disable Airmax mode did not appear until I had changed the wireless configuration settings.
That was what I had missed, and once I turned it off, it all works as it should.
To anyone else looking for a wifi system for your boat:
Since all of my crew can now connect their devices, I will take a moment to share my experience
buying and setting up this system.
Being pretty experienced with IT, I thought I would set this up myself. All of the
parts are pretty inexpensive if you look at each one individually.
I decided to go with the Titanium Bullet M2 HP with a Picostation M as the boats wifi router router. (I have installed dozens of Linksys routers and my experience with them is that they are simple to use, but will reliably start to have intermitent failures after a couple of years in an office
environment. Where they can be replaced cheaply, that is not a big deal, but on a boat in the
Caribbean I was afraid they would not last as long, and finding a replacement would be harder. For this reason, I chose the Picostation).
To be fair, my wife spent a day researching available systems before I started looking at this, and I took the information she gave me and spent another two full days on the
internet deciding what I wanted. I bought the Picostation and the Bullet from a company in
California, along with a couple of simple POE injectors. I bought the
antenna from the manufacturer in Illinois. I bought the exterior Cat5 and coupler from someone in NJ. I bought 12v direct wire 5.5x2.1 male connectors from the manufacturer and bought extras for other boat projects.
At the end of three days, adding
shipping to the prices I looked at initially, I had saved exactly fifty bucks (the fact that I bought the more expensive Titanium Bullet is backed out of my numbers to that I am comparing dollars to dollars). I "made" about $17 a day.
The company in
California (Pasadena Networks, WLAN Parts) shipped the Ubiquiti peices, but forgot to send the POE injectors, and simply will not answer their
phone or return calls, though they eventually sent an
email that said they were sending ONE injector though I ordered two. I still don't have the POE injectors and am just using AC injectors until those show up, if they ever do.
Setup was relatively easy with my networking background, but would have been darned frustrating for someone who is used to just "using" the computer rather than really getting in there are understanding how it all works. Even with the experience I have, it took another 30 minutes to get the Bullet up and running, and I spent 5 hours on the Picostation until Bob showed me what I was missing.
In retrospect, I would order the Islandtime system. While it did not come with the Titanium model Bullet and their router was not my choice (I abhor licensing the number of users on hardware), the system would have arrived complete, from one person, and I would have had tech support if I had questions. Wifi for Boats was offering a system that included the router I wanted, but the Rocket M and MIMO
antenna added cost I could not justify. (Wifi for Boats is currently not selling systems, seeming to have given up on Wifi and looking into cellular options.)
Conclusion: I learned a lot in the four days I spent on getting this ordered and then installed. I certainly am more familiar with they system than most people who just bought it all in one place. But there is no way that the trouble I went through was justified for $50. My
advice, if you are looking for a wifi system like this, just call IslandTime and be done with it.