Fed up with trying to balance my mobile phone on the boom, while working down below on a laptop using the phone’s hotspot, and disgusted with useless marina wifi, I started looking at better solutions. My goal was to have a router onboard that could either connect to an onshore wifi, should we happen to be somewhere that had good free wifi (very unusual these days) or alternatively connect to 4g using an antenna mounted higher up on the boat. Initially I thought about mounting antennae on the mast, but the solar arch project meant we had a better place to put them.
Looking for the right router solution there are plenty on the market that do either 4g or wifi but rarely both. And many of the more specialist solutions were very expensive, obviously aimed at the high end yacht market. By comparison domestic 4g routers can be purchased for under £100, but these don’t look particularly robust and most didn’t have the facility for remote antennae.
After some research I found the Teltonika RUT-950. This is a router designed for mobile applications, runs on anything from 9-30v DC or Power over Ethernet (POE). It has 4g and Wifi support, with 4 wired connections. It also has facility for two SIMs to be installed, so you can easily switch between networks. All of this in a small robust aluminium package for less than £200. Incidentally I think this is the router used in the Glomex Webboat package which sells for around £900, although it’s likely they have added some of their own management software.
My initial thoughts were to mount the router below deck with cables to the antennae, which would be mounted on the arch. But I was also planning on mounting a CCTV camera on the arch (to record video whilst sailing and possibly to provide a remotely accessible webcam), and this would require another cable or two. Somewhere along the line I had a revelation that it would be simpler to mount the router in a water tight box on the arch, along with the camera right next to the antennae. With POE, only one ethernet cable would be required to link up the whole lot, power and all.
For the CCTV camera I sourced the Foscam FI9961EP, described as a ‘vandal proof waterproof outdoor camera’, for £109.99. Although not designed for a marine environment, the Raymarine alternative costs four times as much, so I figured it would be cheaper to replace it every few years if necessary! This is an HD 1080p standard camera and has an internal SD card for recording, so meets my requirements.
The router came with four small whip antennae (two wifi and two 4g) designed for indoor use, but these unscrewed to allow connection to external antennae. A lot of wifi and mobile antennae suitable for outdoor use are no good in a marine environment as they use unsuitable metal components (i.e. galvanized steel) and, as usual, the marine ones are exorbitantly expensive. On the excellent Solwise site I found a range of options, but especially interesting was the unusual Poynting MIMO-1 antenna. 
This appears to be designed to go on the roof of trucks and buses, but its extenal components are all plastic and stainless steel, and it claims to conform to Milspec ratings for salt exposure. Although it’s not cheap, it works out less than buying four separate antenna and is in a very neat package.
To complete the deal I needed a suitable plastic box, and the best place to find these is on the RS site – they have such a huge range so it’s fairly easy to find one that’s exactly the size you need. I chose this polycarbonate box, which has room for the router in the base and plenty of space for wiring.
I started writing this post almost a year ago but I didn’t want to post it until I had proved that it worked. It’s now all up and running so in Part 2 I will explain how I put it all together.