We made a mistake one month and didn't have the HD turned off.

Get a device that could be used as a hot spot for other devices. Since you can't get unlimited plans too easy any more, I would suggest you look into something like Ting. Our experience is that the only decent answer is a good data plan. These are done by someone with a very high degree of technical knowledge and someone who lives aboard and makes his living from the internet. If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, read the 7 part article done by Jeff, the owner of Active Captain. But keep in mind that if you are on the hook or a ball that will likely need to be a 12volt device and there are only a few options and they are very pricey. You can plug this directly into an Ethernet ready device or a WiFi router on your boat. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration but I do know plenty of people that have made good connections from a couple of miles away. This antenna claims to have a 7 mile range. If you do find you have good bandwidth at your marina and the issue is just getting a better signal, I would recommend you look into the Rogue Wave. Again the bandwidth problem is that if there are two people watching Netflix in the laundry mat then the rest of the people have the slowest internet ever. I am now on my 3rd different laundry mat that blocks Netflix. Being liveaboards we do our laundry at laundry mats around our home port. Anchoring out you will general find nothing within range.Īnother problem is many internet access points are cutting off high bandwidth programs like Netflix. We generally stay at 8-15 different marinas/mooring fields in a given year and have not found one with enough bandwidth for streaming video in two years. I would suggest you first take the time to bring a device closer to the access point and see if you have enough bandwidth to justify the investment. There are less and less open access points and the ones you do find have far too little bandwidth to be usable for things like Netflix. Unfortunately WiFi boosters are becoming a bit obsolete.

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