For coastal cruising along the East Coast, we found that both our
Centrino-equipped laptop and the other with a Cisco external wireless card
gave us very iffy connections, no matter if we were getting free access or
buying some hotspot time.

We agree with Rick that an external antenna is the way to go. We found this
high gain antenna "WaveRV" at
http://www.radiolabs.com/products/wireless/waverv.php to be a good solution
to boost our connection. We abandoned the Centrino and external card and
switched to this USB antenna with its own built-in wireless adapter. We
have the antenna on the same mount as our radar and run Belkin USB 2.0 (two
lengths of 16ft/5m size) cable down to the salon. I talked with a tech at
Belkin and he said I could string up to four of this size cable before
experiencing any significant attenuation.

We been using this for about a year and are happy with it (happier when we
find free access...)

For offshore, we use our satphone as a modem to download weather updates.
Email waits until we get to port.

Val Nucci
S/V Valerie Arden, Baba 40

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Received on Sat Aug 12 04:49:23 2006