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move out of the marina. the boat to your left and your right will not then block the views,tv signal or wifi signal and you will probably pay less for moorings.

I took the boat out for a troll down the Thames last Sunday. Lovely morning, blue skies, no rain and a gentle breeze. When I returned to the marina, the wind was gusting 4-5 and black clouds were gathering. My mooring location means I have to execute a 180 turn to drive in bow first, between my home pontoon and the neighbouring broad-beam GRP cruiser. I decided, for a number of reasons (nicer view, better TV and WiFi signals etc) to try to reverse into my allotted slot. I tried a number of times to judge how far the wind would blow the bow around during the time it would take me to complete the reversing manouver, and I have to admit I failed utterly. (Wind was hitting me square on from the right, my pontoon's on the left and my neighbour's cruiser is on my right). I was single-handed, unfortunately, but that all changed when the inevitable happened and I hit another boat (not a plastic-shattering happening, fortunately - the boat I hit was a steel wide-beam narrowboat and the contact was made quite gracefully) and the owner popped his head out of the hatch and asked if I wanted a hand. I gratefully accepted, but even with his help we couldn't avoid the effect of the wind blowing the bow out of alignment (which meant a blip of forward to try to bring it round, thus putting the stern out of alignment etc. etc.) We finally settled for stopping at 90 degrees to the mooring pontoon and hauling the boat into the berth by dint of brute force and ignorance. I felt a bit depressed by the episode, but things were brought into perspective about 5 minutes after I finally tied-up. The heavens had opened and the wind was really howling, but I could still hear the scream of over-revved engines and desperate bursts of bowthruster as the owner of half-a-million squids worth of cruiser tried to get onto his mooring about 80 yards away from me. After quarter of an hour or so, he actually gave up and fled to the wide open spaces of the river to wait until things calmed down a bit. I'm not trying to re-ignite the old old debate, by the way. Just relating a recent experience. John ps. Any hints and tips most gratefully received.

Having now done the up section, most worries were unnecessary. I wasn't 100% sure that running the engine flat out for two and a half hours would do it any good, but it performed perfectly, even though we didn't get to Savick Brook in time and had to proceed to Preston for the night. Having done that, I'd say it would be my preferred choice (if CRT gave you the option). The mooring was £10 on a pontoon (showers and WiFi) and then the following morning it is an easy run back on the ebbing tide to Savick where there is plenty of water to get up the brook, although you then have to wait for that day's boats coming up from Tarleton before you carry on under the Pipe bridge (which is clearly the limiting factor when going up the brook). Coming from Preston direction there is no issue with the sandbar at the entrance to Savick and since it was only about half an hour after high water there wasn't much of a flow either. I'd be interested as to just how you measure a boat's draught since when we had our's blacked I measured at the skeg and it was 2'8", well above the 2'3" limit given in the Ribble Skippers guide. At the front of the boat however it is substantially less than this so I suppose that what you may need is an average of front to back since the boat would pivot on a central point if the skeg ran aground forcing the bow to go down, however it is done, at no point did we ground anywhere on the Savick Brook, but then having come down from Preston we had loads of water, even though it wasn't a spring tide (8.9 metres according to CRT, spring tide would have been 9.2metres). All I have to do now is to get back later this month

I got one of these eBay item number: 272008822412 £8.99 and one of these eBay item number:231427435523 £6.47 Plugged into a Samsung Galaxy S3 mini, worked brilliantly! It turned one measly signal bar into full reception, and using the phone as a wifi hotspot on 3g the download speeds seem as good as they are at home! The patch cables are quite hard to find, an they seem to sell out quickly. There is one left on ebay at the moment.

I have just bought this router (also from Solwise) in order to share the wifi around the boat. http://www.solwise.co.uk/wireless-usb-usbwifirpt-3000.html Haven't had a chance to test it onboard yet, but it worked well when connected to my home wifi. It has a USB connection for your external antenna, and two ethernet ports for your laptops. Or of course, they can be connected via its own wifi as well as iPads and iPhones etc. The unit is much smaller than I anticipated; about the size of a tobacco tin, so it should be fairly inobtrusive.

It's the fee BT wifi he's talking about. It goes into one laptop and he wants to know how to spread it around to more laptops or tablets etc.

I think JR is in part relating to BT wifi not just 3g Mark

Very excellent and well researched original post. We have a 3 MiFi, having previously had a dongle, and have found the network good subject to signal and their customer service has been very good when we have had problems. Did not know that there was an aerial socket on the back of the unit; may explore this as it is useful to know. If you are a BT Broadband customer, they will give you a code that will enable you hook into other BT Broadband wifi units so you can surf the net when you are away from home. We use this and also on the boat with a mag mount aerial going through a booster into a laptop via a USB cable. The booster (Bear Share) is powered by the laptop. What we would like to do is to have the option to get a wireless router to serve the 2 laptops on the boat. Having experimented to date with various options and equipment, to date this has not worked. If anyone has any suggestions they would be welcomed.

Yes, enable the wifi hotspot on your Android phone and you will see the generated WiFi password which you then use to connect the WiFi from the iPad.

The mobile phone will have a "personal hotspot" ie you can use the phone as a router and connect to it via wifi from any device, phone, computer, tablet etc, and use the internet on those devices. If the phone is an iphone, and is on the same apple account as the ipad then if you have bluetooth turned on both the phone and ipad, the ipad will be able to connect to the wifi on the phone without the personal hot spot being on the phone screen, this is very convenient.

You need to enable your phone as a wifi hotspot to share the mobile data, the ipad then connects to this via wifi to access the mobile data. Bluetooth will not do what you’re hoping for.

Excellent, excellent, excellent OP by @NB Ellisiana, packed full of good information there, thanks and greenie given. I'm in very much the same boat as it were with requiring excellent internet for work while CCing around the country. 'Pologies for reviving this old thread, but I think it's perhaps in need of an update. As 6-months-in newbies we're still trying to figure out what we need and how to get it before we drop a lot of cash. But we do intend to drop the necessary cash to make sure that our internet is as good as we can get it. Our current system is working fairly well in the southeast (where we are currently) but no doubt this will need an upgrade when we venture further out. We are simply relying on hotspots provided by our two phones. For redundancy, we each have a 12-month SIM only contract from different networks. One EE at 22 GBP / month for 40 GB and unlimited calls/texts, and one '3' for 20 GBP / month for unlimited everything (including data). This is the exact opposite of my experience. EE has been excellent in every way, including the customer service. 3 on the other hand barely works even in London. They say it's because they are rolling out the next generation of towers, which may or may not be accurate. However 3 with the uncapped deal is still handy to have. Is this technology moving on or is this just different areas having different coverage? Which network or deals are people swearing by these days? Secondly, I'm sure the technology has come a long way since the Huawei E5332. Any updated recommendations for the fastest and strongest Mi-Fi router that will accept an external aerial? I may be dreaming but if it was dual-SIM and could automatically pick the strongest connection, that would be first prize! I would also want to be running the internet entirely off 12V, like the OP. Finally, having a secondary router / wifi extender so that I could have strong signal on both ends of the boat - has this been necessary/advantageous for anyone here?

Don’t be confused. Be confused dot co... It’s not you who’s confused, it’s DC who’s confusing a good solid 4G connection with 5G. A simple screen grab of Speedtest.net showing well in excess of >100Mbps download would support his assertion but I note there’s been nowt to support his claims. EE are actually now offering a 5G modem (for £500 no less!) https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/06/ee-uk-details-new-htc-5g-hub-mobile-broadband-wifi-router.html

The reference to 5GHz I would have thought would be WiFi, in that it presumably supports that as well as 2.4GHz as most routers do. I am confused by the claim being made hare that 5g has been used all over the country for the last 12 months, when I think it was only May this year that EE had the initial rollout to a handful of major cities.

I believe it might be this one: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HUAWEI-E5186-22-5G-300Mbps-4G-LTE-Wireless-WiFi-Router/113664376884?_trkparms=ispr%3D1&hash=item1a76ecc034:g:RrUAAOSw0lhccPfL

We had some of that on a wifi antenna once. What fun that was getting it in the boat.....tis bloody huge,and not very flexible, but probably a solution if the 'thin' cable don't work (which it probably will).

After a bit more reading I am now firmly on the train of thought that the modem needs to be located next to the antenna - i.e. up the mast. I feel like going to all the effort and expense of putting an antenna up just seems a little unjustified if you then go and use long cables. First prize therefore would be a basic dual sim modem with antenna plugs and an rj45 out. Then I can raise the mast to any height I like (well, accounting for the power lines they love to string above canals) and I don't have to worry about attenuation over my cat5e cable. Then I plug the cable into a wifi repeater or two as necessary inside the boat.

I have the Rut955, I believe @Dr Bob has the Rut 950.I think the main difference is mine has a built-in GPS. I use the cable supplied, it is wired into the antenna and has plugs on the end which would need to be reattached if your shortened the cable I too believe there is a large signal attenuation caused by cable length, and in fact get a better signal when the antenna is lower down the pole in some places. I bought my router and antenna off ebay. I think 130 quid for both. Not sure I would want to stick a 200 quid router in a box up a mast, but can see why you would want to. Although I have the WiFi antennas attached, I don't think the range is that good. We added a WiFi repeater to get the signal down the entire length of our 70ft boat.

Apologies, I get lost when threads go above 4 or 5 pages!! Is it the Teltonika RUT955 that you have? I see Solwise sells it through Amazon for 191 gbp, it costs a little more on their website (207.41 gbp). @Dr Bob @rusty69 Do you use the full 5m length that comes with the Poynting? I am a bit worried about the attenuation over that length? I spoke to a friend who knows networking and suggested that I mount the modem itself in a weatherproof box next to the antenna up the mast. And then run the wifi down over ethernet to a wifi repeater. You get those USB dongles that are mobile modems lacking wifi, but I haven't ever seen something like that that can take an external antenna. I suppose you could do that with the Teltonika. Just run the WiFi antennae down into the boat cabin. Would attenuation be an issue with that too? Thanks for the tips I'm slowly starting to learn what some of this means...

Thank you! I gave up on the idea of antennae located in different spots because I read elsewhere that the cable length should be kept to under 5m due to signal attenuation. I have narrowed down what I'm looking for: 1. Omni directional MIMO 4G antenna. - Mounted on 4m tall mast - 5m cables leaving 1m to get from the roof to the router - As per @WotEver's article, the Poynting A0001 (XPOL-1 or XPOL-A1) is the obvious choice. 2. Wi-fi router (mi-fi / mobile hotspot) - Connections for above antenna - 12V power supply - Dual SIM with failover functionality (hard to find) - fast 802.11n WiFi Just need to choose a model of router now.

I think I may have got to the bottom of this. I went into the EE shop in Daventry this afternoon to look at their deals on 300/500Gig of data. The data sims come with a router. On the box, in 3 places are the letters '5G'. I asked the girl if the router was 5G ready.....she looked on the box and said Yes.... In the quick set up you can read the words "5G" many times and it is even stamped on the bottom of the router. Absolutely.....this router ...and sim work on 5G....FACT. BUT it is not the 5G we are talking about. This refers to the 5Ghz radio transmission of the wifi IN your router to your attached devices. IT IS NOT the 4G/5G transmission from the masts. DC is NOT getting 5G reception. He is getting the very fast and very reliable 4G EE signals that I have been getting for the last 2 years. 5G is not up and running in the areas DC has been in. DC, as Tony asks, can you grab a screen shot of your download speed to show us you are only on 4G to confirm the above? I think more peeps will get confused over this as the router box manufacturers are using the words 5G instead of 5Ghz.

A few years ago you had to connect everything on your home network with Ethernet cable. Now the vast majority of devices use WiFi. I wonder what will happen to home broadband. There must be a lot of people who only have a wired phone line in order to connect to the internet. Meanwhile taxpayers are paying a small fortune to have the country wired up for fibre connections. It will probably just about all be in place when the majority of us connect through a mobile data link. I was on Nantwich embankment at the weekend. My phone registered 76 Mbps on a 4G+ connection; I get 30 Mbps on my home Infinity fibre connection.

Best solution I found was to buy any old cheapo 3G (or 4G) phone with a Three contract SIM with unlimited data (not a specific data contract as they are a rip off) then install EasyTether. Buy an WiFi router capable of running OpenWrt (e.g. Linksys WRT1900 AC) and install this with a USB cable running out of the boat (ideally somewhere in the well deck under a cratch cover, but you could run it anywhere so long as the length is kept under 5metres. Install EasyTether on the router also. To use the internet just plug the phone into the USB cable somewhere outside the boat, disguise phone in a plastic box even and connect your laptop/tablet to the WiFi on the router. This will get Internet access for any device on the WiFi network all routed through the mobile phone, and because of EasyTether Three won't know you are using tethered data so you'll have a truly unlimited data allowance rather than paying a lot for the Data only SIM cards.

"Do you slow my data connection? With each Skyroam daily service package or "globaldaypass," you get 24-hours of unlimited internet on up to 5 devices. There is absolutely no data cutoff! Each 24-hour daypass provides access to the fastest network globally (HSPA+) ,with speeds up to a 3G/4G hybrid. This may vary from country-to-country depending on local data networks. Thedaypass is modeled to provide the best possible experience to Skyroam customers, so the vast majority of users only get fastest speeds. If there is high usage (over 500MB) within 24-hours, the connection with go to a lighter 2G speed, which is great for e-mail, web surfing, social media, apps, messaging, and WiFi calling. Data always resets with the next global daypass. Note: Skyroam is not optimized for video services like YouTube, Netflix or other heavy streaming activities."