Hi ,Bill, and groups,
My apologies if this is a duplication - I tried to respond some time
ago, but had a crash, or just, perhaps, Googlegroups, where I do this
because I don't have a news feed, doesn't show it?
Bill Kearney wrote:
Does your setup let you identify and select from shore points, or do
you have to somehow first configure the arch unit?
When I get to where I need wifi it's a simple matter of surfing to the arch
unit's web configuration page, selecting a site survey and picking an SSID.
Works pretty well.
From that I infer that you do your surfing from the AP to the bridge.
Or, do you have to unhook the ethernet and do it by hooking it to your
NIC? Either way, do you have to make your interface the same IP
family, or can it do it over dhcp?
Turned down the radio's transmission mW setting until it just barely covers
more than the cockpit region of the boat. Ended up being about 9mW.
Pretty cool. I assume that's also done on web interface, with a mouse
click or perhaps direct entry? Are these the usual 40mw or something
else?
One unit's in the arch, the other's in a cabinet belowdecks. Both are
powered off the boat's 12vdc. They're on the same breaker so I can cut
power to them when they're not needed. I just ran 14ga wire directly to
them instead of screwing around with power-over-ethernet.
I'd had the same idea - but don't know how much power they take. In my
case, it will be up the mast; if I have both units in that NEMA, it
would take two POE units. OTOH, what would both of them draw (so I
could figure out what size wire I'd have to run to them)?
An important point is to keep the radio that's talking to the shore as close
as possible to the antenna. There's no sense in having this sort of setup
if you're going to just go and lose gain by running a long length of coax.
I've got about 30" of cabling total from the antenna to the router mounted
inside the arch. Then I run wired ethernet to the second router belowdecks.
Wired ethernet can run upward of 100 meters, a much better deal than RF coax
dB loss.
My antenna coax is about 6" so I think I'll be ok on that :{)) In my
case, up at the top of the mast, with the lightning arrestor as the
mount point of the antenna (pigtail to the bridge inside connects to
the arrestor), I didn't have to elevate the antenna more than the
bridge.
The single biggest advantage to this is all the admiral has to do is fire up
her laptop and use the 'boat' ssid. No extra config hassles on her machine.
This alone is worth the effort. Sure, I have to manually select the shore
ssid but that's a trivial process.
Ditto - but mine has the other item in spades, where she can call her
kids and her mother, and for that matter, as she did Sunday, her twin
in Hong Kong and her sister in England, on a three-way, all over wifi.
I have yet to hook up the new Vonage router and double phone set, but I
expect it will do just fine - and it's another 12v item :{))
L8R
Skip, reinstalling the tranny and other driveline excitement tomorrow
Morgan 461 #2
SV Flying Pig KI4MPC
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"Believe me, my young friend, there is *nothing*-absolutely
nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing,
messing-about-in-boats; messing about in boats-or *with* boats.
In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter,
that's the charm of it.
Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your
destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never
get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in
particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to
do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."
-Bill Kearney