On board again

Now I've been back on the boat for a few weeks. She's a second home for me so despite all the work and expense involved in having a boat I'm still glad I kept her. My brother-in-law and his wife were here for the first week and rented a small apartment nearby. Uffe was a great help doing the heavy work with the boat before she was launched. I am so grateful he undertook the worst job of all: renewing the toilet plumbing. He fought with it in the tiny space for hours on end to remove the old pipes and change the ball valves. In the meantime I banged, hacked and scraped the inside of the brass T-junction and pipes to remove years of lime.
On the first leg of the seasons voyage  Uffe accompanied me to make sure everything worked.
The boats built-in GPS was a bit unreliable and the navigation app on my ipad couldn't get a fix either which was worrying. I had to rely on good old fashioned paper charts instead. Otherwise everything worked. On arrival at Porto Heli I sprayed the GPS antenna with electro cleaner and fixed the Ipad by turning off location services, then turning them on again. Wish everything was that simple....
The next job was to try and install the Iwirie wifi booster I had bought. The idea is to pick up wifi signals from land so that I can have internet and my own hotspot on board. I mounted the antenna on to the bimini frame, drilled a hole in the fibreglass cockpit combing and crawled under the deck to put the wiring in place. The software was quite easy to install and after scanning I was thrilled to get a whole list of possible wifi sources. The nearest hotel looked promising and as they had an unsecured connection I chose that. It works! Last year I spent a lot of money and time on establishing and maintaining an internet connection so this is a great improvement.

2 comments:

  1. Hello Elizabeth,
    I follow your blog and really enjoy reading them. You give me courage to learn more of the technical side of sailing.

    We are looking for a good WIFI booster and I just read your blog where you installed the IWIRIE booster. I was wondering if you could give us some feedback on it after a full season of sailing. Are you still happy with it? Were there problems picking up WIFI signals? Also we are not very computer savy people and I wanted to know if it is fairly easy to install. - Not worried about the physical installation (wiring, etc) as we are fine with that just the computer end of things.

    Thank you.
    Robyn

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  2. The Wirie was very simple to install regarding the wiring and the computer installation. There were very easy step by step instructions that were simple to follow, even for me! When you get the wirie app on your computer screen it shows a list of all the wifi signals it can pick up,I was able to pick up signals from hotels about 2 M away and cafes about 500 meters away. I just went ashore to have a coffee and get the passwords. Some places had a very limited radius and were not possible to pick up so I had to drink many cups of coffee. It was great to have my own hotspot on board as well so I had my iphone, ipad and computer connected.

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