When we started out last year we were kitted out by our friend Matt, MD of WiFi Spark to allow us to zoom in on and access unprotected WiFi networks ashore. [When kids do this by going around in a car - its called "War Driving".] We have two professional antennas and the equipment onboard to enable us to pick up a gnat broadcasting on WiFi at a range of 1 mile!
The only problem is that most of the WiFi systems we have experienced have been in the "Chocolate Teapot" category of usefulness. Bandwidths of less than 1 Mbps are quite common. And as you can see from the picture above, some WiFi systems...well, they are just not plugged in.
We have an HF Ham radio on-board which lets us send and receive email via the WinLink network. It is really great when you are a couple of hundred miles out at sea to be able to stay in touch - but we’re lucky if we can get data rates as high a 600bps which means a short email might take as much as five minutes to transmit or receive. We are limited to the time we can use the WinLink Network (Typically 60 - 90 minutes a day) so we tend to use this only when we’re at sea and can’t get anything else.
We also have a couple of VHF radios (range about 40 miles) and an Inmarsat C satellite transceiver - but these also tend to be useless (or too expensive) for anything other than emergencies. We could do "ship-to-shore" telephone calls, but the costs are measured in £/sec!
So up until this year our main means of communication has been to go ashore and track down a local Internet Cafe. Simple you might think, but if you think it is a nightmare trying to get Microsoft Windows software to do what you want - you should try it when everything is in Greek! And how do you respond when you get one of those little pop up windows that say things like, " Windows has discovered an error and will have to reboot - press "yes" to lose all your work, or "no" to be asked this same question again."
You can take your own laptop – at least the screen now speaks a language you can understand! But the last time we did this, all our PCs got infected with a noxious virus that took ten days and lots of effort to get rid of.
Things looked up when a good friend from Bovey found us two second-hand Nokia N-95 mobile phones as they do WiFi and Internet as well. So we would walk around towns with our phones held up in the air scanning for WiFi signals - a bit like StarTrek scanning for life on an uninhabited planet. The N-95's have been pretty useful, and it works especially well as a camera! Sadly, I managed to crack my screen.
A replacement arrived from e-Bay and I carried out replacement surgery (above) on the boat. Believe it or not it was successful and my phone is back in action.
The real breakthrough came when we got a "Cosmote Dongle." This is not some weird kind of piercing – it’s a plug in USB stick that enables our new netbook PC to go online using the Greek 3G network. Not everywhere mind you, but when we get a good 3G connection we can email, blog and we have even managed a couple of Skype video calls to the UK and America! Wow, that was better than pictures from the moon!
So now we can make contact with friends and family from the boat without even going ashore. This is a wonderful thing. As the song goes, " ...we may not always know where we are going, but we know where we come from." It is great to call home.
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