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Internet Access While Sailing? (Revisited)
El Genio Malvado writes "10 years ago the question was asked, What is the best way to get Internet while at sea? After reading the responses — and after a decade of technological advancement — is there a better, more reliable method? For someone with the ability to telecommute 100% of the time, then the idea of sailing around the world with a paycheck direct deposited must be getting more and more tempting. What does the community at large have for modern resources for constant streaming internet at sea?"
... what about getting sex...
That's what sea cucumbers are for.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If you have the money, look into BGAN terminals. Hughes and Thrane & Thrane are the two major manufacturers.
I'm too lazy to insert links, google is your friend.
In some countries the NMT system is still operational and is used by ships for it's excellent coverage (compared to GSM, that is). Don't have any links at the moment, but I know some ships that are using NMT to get an OK network connection when out on the sea. Other than that, I think I remember you can surf using VHF. Don't know about SSB, internet over SSB would be slow but with an awesome coverage. Last resort: Satellite.
Quantum hacker.
This was asked sooner than 10 years ago, and I'll repeat my answer to that thread.
You want BGAN. It's an INMARSAT service. Designed for marine use, but will not be cheap
http://www.inmarsat.com/Services/Land/BGAN/default.aspx
- Sig
But I remember when a Loran-C was high tech. Now people want to stream video from the middle of the Atlantic... Hey, back in the old day we didn't need porn we just brought women with us. Owning a sailboat and cruising the Caribbean went a long way towards getting those panties off!
But seriously, always have a good old almanac and sextant as a backup. Because if your generator gets fucked, you and your high tech toys are fucked. They never turn off the sun and stars, however ('cept in a storm of course - Murphy's law would have your generator fail in the middle of the hurricane anyway).
Personally I go sailing to get AWAY from the rest of the world, not to stay connected to it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
A+++ yuck. Would spew again.
It's amazing how much it relies stress too, so it's a win-win for both me and the company.
I would be afraid that whatever technology you select to stay connected with the source of all your income would suffer from outages too often. I think in this case it would increase stress if anything.
However, it would be great way to start a day by waking up in the morning and take a swim in the sea in middle of nowhere.
Middle of the ocean? Why would such a featureless landscape seem any different from another featureless landscape? I would think it would be amazing to go to the Maldives or another resort-y area and take a swim there. But the middle of nowhere ... why?
what about getting sex
Please, I'm in the middle of DC and I'm probably getting as much as I'd get in the middle of the ocean. I am posting on Slashdot after all ... I do enjoy how you commoditize it though. "Sir, may I take your order?" "One hot steamy cup of sex, please!"
My work here is dung.
yes, nothing has 100% uptime, thank you captain obvious. It would also be helpful to let him know that the sea is in fact both blue and wet. And since we're wasting time stating common knowledge, you are a douchebag.
You cant find wired services that have 100% up times.Good luck with the wireless tube dream.
INTERNET IS TUBES!
Get a diving suit and a pair of wire cutters...
Dive down to an underwater cable, cut it and splice yourself into the middle of it! High bandwidth internet access at sea.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Agreed, Fleet Broadband is your only good option. It's not particularly cheap, though it doubles as a sat phone which you'd probably want anyway. I guess it all depends on how much bandwidth you need vs how much money you make. It's not particularly fast either, 300k-ish if I recall, and it's a shared channel(s). But it's much faster and cheaper than the older F-77 technology.
Also that equipment isn't the worlds most reliable, you either need to buy two so you can have a backup, or think hard about how much downtime will cost you when you are two weeks out of kerplopistan harbor and nobody there knows how to fix one of these things so you have to get parts flown in air-freight.
The trouble is most satellites use spot-beams to focus their signals on continental areas, where the people are. They intentionally focus their signals AWAY from the ocean, where the people are not. Services like Hugues Net, etc. They usually work in coastal areas, but that's about it.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
1. A lot of marina's seem to be starting offer wifi which covers the moorings. So you can at least get online when in port at reasonable speeds.
2. GSM coverage usually extends at least 10 miles offshore, if you're travelling parallel to the coast (and it depends where in the world you are) you might be able to use GSM networks. Getting hold of local sim cards is much cheaper than paying roaming fees.
3. Iridium phones can manage dial up internet access at 2400bps for around $1.50 per minute. Globalstar phones will give you 9600bps but (despite the name) coverage is far from global. Thuraya give you "unlimited" internet access for a mere $3550 per month and speeds into hundreds of kilobits per second. Other's have already mentioned Imarsat's BGAN. http://www.satphone.co.uk/index.shtml has good info on all of these.
4. Try and rig up something over amateur radio and use an AX25 to TCPIP gateway. Speeds will be slow (a few kilobits per second at best) and its likely to be unreliable. But it should be cheap/free.
"Food, drinks, health and hygiene stuff, what about getting sex "
Buy them in port like everyone else.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The million dollar carbon fiber sailboats that compete in the Volvo Ocean Race in 2009 used three systems for voice, data, and fax communications. The one that I recall was Thrane & Thrane SAILOR 500 Fleet Broadband. They would shoot HD video with HD cameras and then upload clips via that system from the middle of the ocean. SAILOR 500 Fleet Broadband is a complete system with bandwidth up to 432kbps and allows phone calls to be placed at the same time. I believe the monthly service fee is upwards of $400 a month excluding equipment fees and installation. http://www.thrane.com/Maritime/Products/Satellite%20Communication/SAILOR%20FleetBroadband/SAILOR%20500%20FleetBroadband.aspx
Yes, for example Columbus. Since he had no internet access, he could not just look up his coordinates in Google Earth to find out where he was, and therefore he thought he were in India when he wasn't. Also a quick check in Wikipedia would have shown him that true Indians look quite different, and he would not have mistaken the native Americans for Indians.
So you see, having internet access is quite important when sailing.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If you are ANYWHERE near South Africa, New Zealand or Oz use a carrier pigeon it's faster than access here anyway and heaps cheaper. Plus you won't get nailed when going over your data cap!
If you downloaded copyrighted works illegally while you are sailing does THAT make you a pirate? If you did do such a thing where would the RIAA send the notice?
Lol this is just a joke, that is all.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Also a quick check in Wikipedia would have shown him that true Indians look quite different, and he would not have mistaken the native Americans for Indians.
Perhaps Columbus had a very-early draft copy of a textbook that would come to be approved by the Texas Board of Education?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A better question is this: If you were in international waters is it even a violation of copyright? What jurisdication's rules would be followed? What court could the plaintiffs sue you in? And, after reading this, who is going to go set up a new floating island in international waters with massive bandwidth and call it a "download destination" for a piratical getaway? "Come stay a week with us and torrent every movie and song ever written." BYOS (Bring Your Own Storage).
I'm in the middle of DC and I'm probably getting as much as I'd get in the middle of the ocean. I am posting on Slashdot after all ... I do enjoy how you commoditize it though. "Sir, may I take your order?" "One hot steamy cup of sex, please!"
I feel for you; I understand that what with all the high paid bureaucrats and politicians, hookers cost a fortune there. Here in the midwest you can get a cup of hot steamy sex for twenty bucks or even less.
Free Martian Whores!
Arrrr! there be WiFi pirates!
Hoist the Wifi Jolly roger! Ready the laptop's me maytes this one has load balancing uplinks!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Forget BGAN, they charge on actual throughput and can be pretty expensive to operate. What you actually need is a SeaTel or similar tracking antenna - this will constantly keep you connected to the satellite as you are mobile, an iDirect http://www.idirect.net/ 3000 series or X3 modem (depends on the provider you use) and a subscription with one of the many providers of such services. The initial setup costs could be a bit pricey, so just look at the hardware cost as an investment. Your best bet is a provider with the ability to actually offer service over multiple satellites covering most of the globe. It can get a bit complicated when switching satellites so choose a company which specializes in Maritime VSAT services, they will be able to advise you on how best to do this.
Much depends on where you are going to be, exactly what access you want, and how much you are willing to pay.
Long distance cruisers generally go for SSB-based email (either Sailmail or Winlink) because it's cheap and relatively reliable. Of course, "reliable" in this context means that depending on the HF propagation conditions you can probably get an email message out sometime that day. And you are limited to short, text-only messages. Still, these days you can update blogs, Facebook, etc. via email...
Other systems like Ocens are also available for email via Iridium.
After that, if you are offshore and away from GSM coverage, you start talking about real bucks. Inmarsat is the most common. Iridium, Inmarsat, Globalstar, etc. all pretty much have two things in common - they are slow compared to land-based systems and they bill by the bit.. a lot. Streaming video and surfing Spring Break Girls Gone Wild is probably not in the cards. Hell, even checking a webmail email account is not really feasible unless you are Carlos Slim and own a telephone company.
So, that's a long way of getting around to saying this: In the past 10 years, not a lot has changed. Inshore, close to cell coverage, you can do very well. Offshore, you are still pretty much stuck with the same old systems that were in place 10 years ago, only now they are more expensive. Oh, and in the case of Globalstar, they are also less reliable now.
In 1980 I went sailing. I had made heaps of money in - of all places - Belgium, where we wrote one of the first commercial packet switching networks in the world. It was cool. And no installed base, oh joy.
Anyway I bought a 30' Iroquois catamaran and set off. I sailed about 2 years, down to the Med, over the Atlantic, around the West Indies. Sometimes single-handed, mostly with 2-4 folk aboard. There may have been some drinking.
It was, without doubt, a high point of my life, despite the storms, loneliness, terrible food, sunburn. And did I mention the storms?
No GPS then - we had to use a sextant. I wrote some nice sight reduction programs for it on my HP 41C calculator - you just can't kill off habits, can you?
Communication - we didn't have no stinking communication! A VHF radio, range about 20miles, and otherwise we could listen to shortwave radio sometimes.
We could only send the odd postcard from ports, and look - without much hope nor any success - in the poste restante in the main post offices. Phone calls were very expensive and we did this rarely.
We didn't have comms - there was no internet (we were just inventing networks - inter-networks lay in the future) HF radios would have weighed more than the boat. Food, water more important.
(And in case you cared ... I ended up selling the boat in the Virgin Islands - it's still sailing in Florida apparently; moving to Australia, where I still am, happily in the sun, still writing the odd bit of code. And I still have the sextant in the garage - it's a lovely thing. The HP41c has not survived. Nor has HP, not really).
Pah - on-board communication, nah - listen to the waves. Enjoy the quiet. Watch the sky. See the moon rise, blood red, from the sea. Let your mind actually think, perchance dream.
"Cats like plain crisps"
No sailboat can keep up with a cruse ship. At least not the type of sailboat we're talking about here.
We had very reliable daily communication with home in the US.....via SSB ham radio. No Internet, obviously, or even computers or programmable calculators. In fact, no calculators at all. We did have a nice old Loran A that we used to get fixes at night. We always did a Noon meridian transit to verify our latitude and kept track of distance covered with the taffrail log. No problem finding Barbados dead-on after 28 days at sea. For the older hams who might remember, the rig was a Galaxy GT-550 and the antenna was a Hy-Gain triband vertical. We mostly used 15 meters.
Our electronics, freezer and refrigerator was powered by a 32 volt battery bank that was recharged via a 15KW diesel generator or the diesel propulsion engine. For entertainment, we had a Zenith Transoceanic radio for BBC, VOA, etc and we had a reel-to-reel tape deck stereo system that we could use when the generator was running as was usually the case at meal time since the main stove was electric.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Priceless.
I don't therefore I'm not.
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