Those of you out there that have developed a habit for ‘hanging their dongle out of a nearby porthole’ might be interested in this bit of kit; a ‘3G router’ from a company called Solwise. We installed one of these routers on BELLE a few months back and we are really pleased with it so far - see photograph below.
The 3G router is plugged into a 230v ac 13 amp socket in BELLE’s office. The USB cable you can see coming out of the bottom of the router goes under the gunwale and connects to a nearby Orange 3G dongle. This dongle has been fixed to the underside of the gunwale using double sided foam tape. An aerial lead then connects this dongle to a small magnetic mount 3G aerial on the cabin roof. The lead is hidden behind the side panels and the roof timbers and passes through one of the cabin roof mushroom vents, so no extra holes required. All very neat and tidy and it improves the 3G signal no end. It also obviates the need to keep ‘hanging your dongle out of a nearby porthole’.
We purchased our magnetic mount aerial a couple of years back from Boaters Phone Company. They are available elsewhere of course - we recommend that you shop around to get the best price. Solwise sells some larger and more efficient external aerials suitable for 3G communications. We have not gone that way yet because we get a reliable 3G signal for most of the time using just the little magnetic mount aerial arrangement described above. Solwise also sells a wide variety of aerial lead adaptors and pig-tails, etc.
This set-up enables us to wirelessly use a laptop anywhere on board BELLE. If the laptop is co-located in the office, then the wireless signal strength is of course 100%. This drops to about 75% – 80% when the laptop is in use at either end of the boat. No problem – it all works OK. In theory, others on board could use this wireless network simultaneously, but the 3G bandwidth might not be up to it – if we ever try this out, we will let you know how it goes.
You can also expand the network to a wireless printer and webcam, etc. It’s pretty versatile really. I have not tried to use our laptop wirelessly outside the boat yet – my guess is that it will not work very well for the same reasons that dongles don’t work very well when located inside the boat. In any case, I have encrypted our network so that others cannot ‘piggy back’ our 3G connection and access our printer, etc..
Those of you interested in doing something similar may wish to note that not all 3G dongles have an external aerial connection, so best check first. If the user guide that came with the dongle makes no mention of an external aerial connection, have a good look on the outside of the dongle anyway to see if you can see a really small cover that when removed exposes a really tiny socket. Our Orange dongle user guide made no mention of this connection at all. If you ask the staff in the local mobile phone shop about this sort of thing, they will probably just stare back at you with a blank expression. Alternatively, there are aerial adaptor products on the market that slide onto the outside of the dongle – Solwise sells these as well.
We have not knowingly encountered any interference problems and the set up is very stable and easy to configure. Many of the 3G dongles these days are supplied with a software application for your computer. Another point to note is that not all of these software applications allow you to create a set up whereby the 3G mobile connection is automatically re-dialed when dropped. Very bloody irritating indeed when you are out and about and encountering periods of poor signal reception. A very useful feature of this router is that you can set it so that it always automatically dials the 3G mobile connection when dropped – brill!
Cheers, Chris 
PS. The eggs were realy nice!
[...] using the little magnetic mount 3G aerial we mentioned in our BLOG article on 06 March 2010; 3G Communications & Wireless Networking, but there was some scope for improvement. With this new aerial arrangement we have achieved a [...]