A primary challenge during our housesitting gig has been getting reliable Internet access. We hadn't wanted to pay for phone service, cable is not an option at this remote location, and satellite is too expensive. Cellular is both expensive and slow. Yet both of us have jobs that require regular and somewhat speedy Internet access. Fortunately, due to the location right on the water in Port Hadlock, another option presented itself: five miles north, visible across the water, is the Port Townsend Boat Haven, a marina served by the same wireless provider as our slip at Shilshole in Seattle, BroadbandXpress. Although it's a bit further away, it has the virtue of being a solution that has already been paid for.
We picked up an annual subscription last year before we left on our trip, since BBX has hot spots all up and down the Pacific Northwest coast. We could use them in most of the marinas and ports we hoped to visit, and although the service is somewhat limited and definitely not customer-oriented (they refuse to provide support for any equipment other than their own, which is over-priced and under-performing), it's about as good as things get in the marine environment.
Our standard on-board setup for receiving the wifi signal is good up to a mile and has connected at up to three miles, but the basic 8dbi omni-directional antenna and 500mw signal booster wasn't going to cut it across 5.25 miles of open water. Although the straight, open shot was a blessing in that it was absent any foliage or terrain that might block the signal, it was far enough that the dreaded Fresnel zone could be partially obstructed by the bulge of the curvature of the Earth. Moreover, a directional antenna that could be pointed directly at our desired access point was necessary so that other, closer but unrelated signals would not swamp it out.
I settled on a 24dbi grid antenna, which would allow a very tight beam to be directed at the marina hotspots.
We mounted it on a plain old galvanized pipe planted in the ground near one corner of the house, putting it up high enough to eliminate the Fresnel problem but close enough to reduce the cable run into the house.
To power it, we initially used the same Alfa 500mw booster we had on the boat, but it got to be a pain to drag it back and forth, and the ability to tweak the signal for the distance involved was limited, so we picked up and installed an Ubiquiti Bullet2. The Bullet is better designed for such distant connections, with more configuration options and the ability to tweak for the best possible connection. That said, it hasn't actually improved our speed much... we get by with a average .16Mbps which is about what you might get with an old ISDN type connection. Still, it beats the alternatives and it has been very stable and averages lower ping times than our connection in Seattle!
The problem we have is that we control only one end of the link. The BBX folks claim to support connections out to three miles but they probably are simply relying on the normal maximum capabilities of their equipment. Really getting good connections at anything over a mile requires some timing alterations in the signals. We can, and have, made those changes on our end (which means that our upstream bandwidth, what we can send out to the Internet, is roughly double the downstream bandwidth--pretty much the opposite of most connections!) but BBX has no incentive to tune their systems for the distance when most of their customers are actually in the marina itself.
Still, it's proven an adequate solution, if not ideal. I'm impressed with the Bullet, which works across a standard network cable with power injected into it at the house side. It's very compact, has a good management console, and a signal meter built into the device (which itself mounts very near the antenna) which makes it very easy to align the dish with the highest signal strength. It works on a 12V system, which means it could be fairly easy to integrate into a boat-based system in the future without the added complication and waste of power inversion (which most other such dedicated devices require). And because it is a stand-alone device, it doesn't muck with our computers the way the not-ready-for-prime-time drivers for our Alfa 500 booster do.
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