Non-Emergency Data Comms, Offshore and Onshore

[goboatingnow]

I agree think the difference between iridium and cell costs. I’d assume 5-10x costs.

[chubby]

starlink has finite resources.... the prices differences beween home/business/marine/rv/swarm plans imo is just about priority...




you can easily outspec starlinks marine for half the price and get better performance at 1/15 the price with dual HP motion dishes connected to a dual WAN router.



the problem is when that superyacht with the dual panel comes to anchorage and a plane paying 20k a month is in vicinity .. you're gonna get throttled.

every single time.






re: power


not an issue for most cruisers..
i'm guessing most simply won't use while underway if their solar/power inputs are insufficient.

[donradcliffe]

I'm writing this 30 miles off the Baja coast on Starlink. Don't know how far out it will reach. Does texting over the normal smartphone app. It seems available 75% of the time. I tried a whatsapp call to my wife. She was very clear, but there were a lot of drops and reconnects.

[carstenb]

Originally Posted by Statistical

While Starlink is likely going to be impressive for maritime use it is unlikely to be that cheap or capable.

Comparing current residential service to maritime service is a mistake. Starlink for residential fixed location users is $99 because that is what it needs to be to compete. As we have see from traditional gso satellite service maritime use is much much more expensive.

The second is that Starlink is power hungry. That state of the art and downright impressive phased array antenna sucks down the juice. Power consumption is about 100w when receiving spiking to 150w when transmitting.

It will be a game changer for sure but if you think you are going to get exactly what terrestrial residential users get for exactly the same price you are likely going to be disappointed. I guess we will see in the next couple years.

WE now have Starlink and we are NOT seeing this type of power usage. Even the dish is searching we see something around 70W. When it is not searching we are in the 40W range. We have plenty of battery/solar to carry this.

[svfinnishline]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

C. WiFi.
3. The Bullet.

Very often, the built-in wifi card on your laptop won’t give a decent connection. These are designed for connecting inside your house or office, not over distances outdoors.

I find the cheap WiFi dongle to work really well. Some people have reported problems with drivers, but I have never experienced this. The drivers for the cheap (20 euros?) Chinese dongle I have are stored on the dongle itself, and could be installed in two minutes and run perfectly on all my laptops. The range is probably 500% better than the built in laptop card, and using the USB extension, you could raise it up and hang it in the salon window so it gets line of sight. Brilliant investment of 20 euros. I would get something like this:
A6210 | WiFi Adapters | Networking | Home | NETGEAR

Then, the Bullet. This is the basic building block of all of the commercial pre-packaged solutions like the “Wirie”, but there’s hardly any need to pay for this. The Bullet Titanium (the version which is decently weatherproof) costs only $115 (Robot Check) and is a snap to connect. You connect the Bullet to an appropriate antenna and mount the pair as high as you can get it, on a radar pole or a spreader, and run Cat6 weatherproof Ethernet cable to your nav table. You plug one end into a POE adapter, which is what puts power into the Bullet (“POE” stands for “power over ethernet”), and then with another, short, Ethernet cable, you plug into your laptop or into a router. The POE adapter can take 12v power from your main system.
My Bullet is the version 1.0 and works differently from the new ones, so I won’t go deeply into details about how to operate it. It is controlled via your computer by putting in a certain IP address into a browser. You have to manually choose and connect to the AP you want to use. With my old bullet, you had to change the IP address of your computer to a static IP address – very clumsy, but I understand you no longer have to do that.

The Bullet is immensely powerful and immensely sensitive, and will make robust, industrial-strength connections to AP’s you can’t even see with other WiFi adapters, up to incredible distances. Believe me, it is very, very worthwhile, if you intend to use WiFI much.

Other parts you will need:
Robot Check

With the Bullet connected to a router like the Huawei B593 (and I only just figured out myself, how this is done), then the WiFi connection is distributed to all users on the boat. So – you turn on your Bullet, open the control panel, choose a connection, make the connection, close the control panel. Voila – everyone on your boat can connect to your router, and have access to the Internet.

Re: the use of the bullet, wifi and 5G -

IF I understand correctly, the bullet will make the wifi connection to an access point, and connecting that to a POE router makes wifi available to multiple users on board.

Now we want to use 5G when wifi isn't available, with the same intent of distributing wifi access to multiple users.

When I search 5G routers, they all seem to come with their own wifi capabilities - does this not duplicate the functionality of the bullet? Is there a conflict or priority assignment that needs to happen?

Thanks for the help!

[SailingHarmonie]

Originally Posted by svfinnishline

Re: the use of the bullet, wifi and 5G -

IF I understand correctly, the bullet will make the wifi connection to an access point, and connecting that to a POE router makes wifi available to multiple users on board.

Now we want to use 5G when wifi isn't available, with the same intent of distributing wifi access to multiple users.

When I search 5G routers, they all seem to come with their own wifi capabilities - does this not duplicate the functionality of the bullet? Is there a conflict or priority assignment that needs to happen?

Thanks for the help!

I strongly suggest that communication advice that was written 10 years ago is pretty worthless today, even if it was state of the art then.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by SailingHarmonie

I strongly suggest that communication advice that was written 10 years ago is pretty worthless today, even if it was state of the art then.

9 years ago, to be exact


I think the original advice was not all that obsolete until fairly recently, until -- Starlink.


Mobile data connections since then have gone to 5G. It's that much faster, but the way to use it is more or less the same.


Marina wifi has vastly improved, but the Bullet is still as relevant as 9 years ago.


We still use SSB radio and Pactor.


But Starlink changes everything.

[fxykty]

Starlink

Plus a Garmin inReach or similar for emergency text communications if Starlink goes down or isn’t available.

Near shore Starlink or mobile - hotspot from a phone with a local SIM or get a router with mobile SIM capability.

[charliepsycho]

Starlink has changed everything.
Marina Wi-Fi was always rubbish, everyone used to have a bullet or similar for Wi-Fi, it was still rubbish! 3/4/5G only works near civilisation (and then hamstrung by limited download plans, fair use policies and cost.)
In most of the cruising marinas I go in everyone has Starlink and Roam unlimited, it’s a case of spot the dishy as you walk down the pontoon! In fact I am a bit of an oddity in having cellular data for when I am not on the boat to cover monitoring and cameras (we pause Starlink if we are away for more than a month)
It’s not worth messing about, just get a flat mount dishy (the cheapest one) and roam unlimited. Stick a decent router on it and a 12v conversion if you are technical and be done.
Surprisingly we found our phones would use Wi-Fi calling on existing networks until you changed ground station and roaming provider, then you use WhatsApp, or if you are technically minded set up VOIP.
All the horror stories about non priority blah blah are rubbish, you get better than 100Mb all the time, even in really congested areas. Use the priority switch if you are offshore and get an internet connection like you were at home ��
For safety communication we have an Inreach Mini on the cheapest plan Garmin will allow.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by charliepsycho

Starlink has changed everything.
Marina Wi-Fi was always rubbish, everyone used to have a bullet or similar for Wi-Fi, it was still rubbish! 3/4/5G only works near civilisation (and then hamstrung by limited download plans, fair use policies and cost.)
In most of the cruising marinas I go in everyone has Starlink and Roam unlimited, it’s a case of spot the dishy as you walk down the pontoon! In fact I am a bit of an oddity in having cellular data for when I am not on the boat to cover monitoring and cameras (we pause Starlink if we are away for more than a month)
It’s not worth messing about, just get a flat mount dishy (the cheapest one) and roam unlimited. Stick a decent router on it and a 12v conversion if you are technical and be done.
Surprisingly we found our phones would use Wi-Fi calling on existing networks until you changed ground station and roaming provider, then you use WhatsApp, or if you are technically minded set up VOIP.
All the horror stories about non priority blah blah are rubbish, you get better than 100Mb all the time, even in really congested areas. Use the priority switch if you are offshore and get an internet connection like you were at home ��
For safety communication we have an Inreach Mini on the cheapest plan Garmin will allow.

Some of this is not entirely correct in some regions of the world.

Marina WiFi has DRAMATICALLY improved in Northern Europe almost everywhere. There is new equipment designed for this purpose which has the capacity and management capabilities to give good connections to a whole harbor full of boats. it's almost always free. So this has become once again a good way to connect -- at least when you're in a marina. The Bullet helps a lot to get a stable connection at the edge of the marina, but be sure to have a dual band one and not the old 2.4ghz one, as the 2.4ghz band is overloaded in many environments like that, whereas 5ghz is generally ok. I would think this equipment will EVENTUALLY find its way to North America.

Likewise in Northern Europe 4G and 5G mobile phone coverage is practically seamless anywhere within 10 miles of land, even in thinly populated areas. Unlike in the U.S., we do not have limits on tethering here, and we have truly unlimited (no fair use limits) data plans for €20 or €30 which can be used without roaming charges anywhere in the Nordic or Baltic region, with 15gb per month for use in other parts of Europe.

So in this region you don't really need anything else except offshore, and there, in principle, SSB + Pactor works fine for getting GRIBS and other weather.

So we don't really NEED Starlink, but after using it on my friends boat, it's nevertheless become a Gotta Have Dat. At least for me. So I'll be installing that soon.

I'll be installing a Mini, which is what my friend uses, and it was brilliant. We did not always get 100mbs, but the latency is phenomenally low, giving superb Zoom and Teams calls, which is a key function for me since I'm running a business even when I'm out sailing.