The start of my geeking Geeking Out Your Boat Forums

Just some thoughts based on my experience setting up 3g/4g access on commercial boats.

One of my past customers was one of the casino boats here in SC that for years used a satellite system. It worked but was horrendously expensive and best speed was about 256 k or something like that. Seemed to me that they were ripping customers off as I have another customer that we connected a remote mountain cabin with satellite for 100 a month and he got decent high speed and no data charges. However in the marine realm the satellite companies that provide it charge the shit out of it. I have always wondered if you could build your own satellite system using Hughes net equipment and account that could track the satellite. Or adapt one of the marine satellite hardware systems to access your Hughes net satellite Internet account.

Ok to some hard info. The casino boat was paying about 2500 a month for Internet with the satellite system. 98% of the time they only went between 3 and 10 miles from the coast line. I had been able to maintain a signal on my cellphone out to about 4 miles and sometimes 5 from the top deck of the casino boat so we started to research doing data over it. We purchased a cellular router, antenna and booster unit from the 3gstore.com  Being high speed I decided that we wanted 4G to give the best performance. Antenna went on highest mast on boat with about a 50 ft cable from it to the booster unit. Then from booster unit we converted down to a dongle that attached to a usb 3g/4g att/sprint (we tested both att and sprint with about the same results) dongle that in turn plugged into the 3g/4g router. It worked great at the dock with it set to 4G. Blazing fast.

Then there was the but!! but it didn't work reliably and totally crapped out about 2 miles off shore a lot of the time. Didn't work at all if the weather was bad.. etc.. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and researching antennas and other stuff (finally talked to a antenna manufacture in california that gave me that answer to our problem). So we finally figured out the issue. 4G data (LTE, WiMax) is commonly on  1700-2100 MHz, 1900MHz and 2500-2700 MHz).  3G on the other hand runs on 900 mhz..

In a humid environment or in rain or heavy clouds etc.. the moisture in the air kills the signal in the higher 4g frequencies. Under ideal conditions it still has less than half the effective range of 3G. Once we changed the antenna to one designed for 900 mhz, put a 3G booster in place, and forced the router to only connect at 3G or less everything started working. They could under almost all conditions maintain decent internet up to 6 miles off shore. I could even do remote access over it most of the time. Running a network of about 25 computers on the boat their bill ran 300 to 400 a month.

This is the heart of the system we used. A cradle point router that when at dock connected to internet through wifi and when the boat left the dock automatically failed over to the 3G signal..

http://amzn.to/295K08g

It seems most of the boosters we used are discontinued but any reputable one that works on 3g frequencies should work.