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I don’t know if anybody is much interest in getting e-mail,web on-board? I do because I like to get free animated weather info overlayed onto my chart. In this way I can see what is going to happen with the winds up to 4 days out on my route.
I would like to know if anyone else uses this type of info to make life really nice and comfy on a passage? If you do I would like to know what you use to compare with what I’m doing to see if it is a better solution. My wife loves this as we never seem to get the winds wrong on the plot the GRIB info from NOAA via Ugrib and it is all free!
So this is what I do.
A Mifi is a device that slips into you pocket like a mobile phone, it is a mobile phone but you don’t talk over it, it acts like your home router from say BT. All you get is data. It has a big battery and you charge it from you laptop or plug it in to the mains. You wont need one of these if you can pick up Wifi from your marina berth or can do get a data link via a mobile phone or do it from home. I have one called a ZTE 80MF All I do then is buy a pay as you use (not pay as you go) sim from a company called roamline they charge 0.39 cents EURO per meg of data. As I’m sailing in the Med, all I did was put the sim into the Mifi and hey presto we have wifi onboard for a cheap price my wife now emails the family and gets her Kindle books, I get a download from Ugrib on the wind data to import into Raymarine Raytech 4.1 charting software, this in turn “animates” the wind vectors in big red arrows for the next 3 days the bigger the arrow the bigger the wind in knots, so we know what is going to hit us. We used it on our last boat and it never ever got it wrong. I’m now going to fit a extra long range G3/GPRS Areial to the Mifi ZTE 80 on a pole next to the GPS this is for being on the anchor as again if you want to stay in a nice place you want to know when to run if it is going to get bad. Again on our last boat we did this via a laptop and Nokia 6310i with bluetooth to get the data download over to the Raytech software to animate it.
I would be pleased to share this info with anyone who does similar or want to do it as well, we are a bit new to the forum and I can see it is a great swap of info!
I have a 3G Mifi hub too, which I use on the boat. It’s cheaper than paying for the Marina’s wifi, and I’ve got it everywhere I go, rather than just at my home Marina.
Great, Do you have one with an externl Aerial port or does it work at range OK?…….I’m just about to try out one of these (paste the link into your browser below) . I’m going to get a S/S bracket for it. It is not everybody’s cup of tea to do this say on your anchor but if your live-aboard for a while it is a nice thing to have. It was so nice to here that I was not the only nut to mess with this stuff.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/271006338979?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649
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