Ah- That's good Wifi!

Most of the big Uber Fishers that pull in here for a few days are loaded with all sorts of toys. They are usually networked, sat-linked, flat screened, and wired for 12 channel surround. The Nordhaven 68 sitting next to me is a fine example of trying to take it all with you. The owners came in about the same time as we did and flew home. There is so much stuff in there they left the air conditioning running until the transport crew comes to pick it up and take it home. It has a digital server that holds thousands of hours of music as well as countless movies that can be individually directed to any of the 3 staterooms, main salon, or up to the bridgedeck for the night watch. That is only if there isn't anything to watch coming in on the SkyNet Sat dish. Hopefully the guy on watch is also watching the feeds from at least a few of the 6 joystick operated cameras placed around the boat or the gyro stabilized nightvision(IR or Starlight selectable) eyeball up front. The Nordie is so smart, that when the AC quit the other day, somehow it phoned home to Seattle and told the service company. The local boys here didn't EVEN want to touch it, so a couple of days later our new neighbor Tyson shows up to get things back online.

So in previous posts I mentioned the terrible internet connection down here. Some days it works ok, then on others, simple tasks like checking mail just can't be done. Being around here so long, I noted some interesting observations and ran some diagnostics. The flaky internet problem seemed to come and go with certain boats. Give me a Duh!

I don't claim to be an sort of a network guru, so I throw it out to you guys to see if I was going in the right direction. Taking a look at my wifi sniffer shows a bit of the problem. This screenshot was taken just after a couple of big boats left, and after a couple of changes were made here, but it gives you an idea. It was worse a couple of days ago.

Basically all of these boats are screaming a wifi signal on the default channel 6. That USED to be the same as our marina link but I finally got them to change it as an experiment. There are two other access points that show up from time to time also on 6 that are not on today. Egads! No wonder I keep dropping packets.

When I went up to mention this to the manager, she said the internet guys were due in a couple of days to install some new equipment. It's going to make things much better she says.

Sure enough there were a couple of guys poking around a few days later. I saw them wandering down the dock with a laptop and measuring the signal. They came over to me and asked a few Q's. In a combination of broken english and even more broken spani I told them of my findings and must have impressed them enough to gain some credi.

The good news is that the new network is up and running great. The bad news is that I became the new local tech. The installers kept running into problems and asking me to help out. I spend the good part of a couple of days working out some bugs with them. They kept handing me the phone and chatting with some expert. He was constantly steering me in the wrong direction and once I figured that out (and ignoring him), we got things clicked in.

There are still a few bugs, but everyone seems happy. I am finally done running around getting all of the other computers logged in. The new speeds support Skype at crystal clear quality, I can get youtube vids faster than I can view them, and rarely have to reload an incomplete page.

Sometimes you just can't get away. Not sure where to send the bill.