Hello, thank you very much for watching.
I've moved the boat further up the River Soar a little bit. A bit closer to Nottingham. I spent
the last week or so
catching up with friends, doing a lot more work inside. The other day I had a catastrophic
failure with the washing machine. I had a Bosch washing machine on board. Same as I
had in my house. It's a good 11, 12 years old and it decided to leak an entire load
of washings water all over the floor and obviously, that's gone down into the bilge. So I've been
busy soaking that all up and getting rid of it. As I was down on my hands and knees with
a tea towel picking up all the water, a nice big cruiser went zooming past. Way
too fast. Rocked the boat all over the place
and two big glasses and a mug decided to
fall off the draining board and smash on
the floor, in the wet. Now normally when
you smash things, you pick up all the big
bits and vacuum up the small bits. I
couldn't do that and till it all dried
so that's been a bit of fun. I've opened
the washing machine up and seen that the
front lip has got a tear in it, as
well as a pipe. So it's time to get rid
of that and get a brand new washing
machine. More expense. I've been
taking it ever so slightly slower this
last couple of weeks, since the Crick
Show. Whilst I was there, I bumped into a
number of viewers that were very, very
close to purchasing Wi-Fi for boats.
There seems to be a bit of a
worry from a lot of people that as soon
as you move into a mobile home be it an
RV, a caravan, a camper, a boat, or a narrowboat that Wi-Fi, you can't get it and how
on earth, you're supposed to get online and
do your shopping and watch YouTube.
There were some plans on the stall at
the Crick Show that were really quite
expensive and that wasn't the plan, it
was just the equipment. Now, I'm all
for getting good equipment and things
that last. A friend of mine up in
Nottingham said you know you only should
buy a tool once and get a good tool, that
works properly rather than buying lots
and lots of different tools. I'm all for
that sort of thing but some of the
equipment was £500 - £600
and to me, that is ludicrous because I've
spent less than £150 for my
complete setup and I've used different
systems. I've used just mobile phone
hotspots. I've used little gadgets things
that stick by the window - I'm just about
to climb over a stile here so bear with
me - and then the very latest thing I've
purchased is called a Home Router and
boy, it's fast. I don't know if it's
because it's originally mains powered or
not. Whatever the technology inside it,
oh it's fantastic and that really is
what I'm going to talk to you about
today. It's mobile Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G and how
you get it, especially when you're on a
steel boat where reception inside is
limited. So that's the video today.
When I first purchased my boat I bought this small mobile Wi-Fi router. The Huawei E5786
supports speeds of up to 300 Mbps and can either run from its internal chargeable battery
for around about 10 hours or via a USB lead.
There are basically four mobile Wi-Fi networks available here in the United Kingdom.
3G. This has a max download speed of 7.2 Mbps and a max upload of 2 Mbps.
3G HSPA with 42Mbps and 22Mbps
4G LTE with 150 Mbps and 50 Mbps And 4G LTE Advanced with 300Mbps and 150Mbps.
There's a huge array of different 4G aerials available. 4G LTE and above uses multiple
radio data streams to and from the router. Try and get a router with two aerial sockets
as you can take advantage of the faster performance.
I had my Huawei connected to my 12v batteries via a 12v socket to USB adapter.
In the beginning, I propped it up in the window of the boat. However, as the narrowboat is
a long thick metal tube, reception inside was relatively poor.
The benefit of this model is the twin aerial sockets on the base of the unit. They are
a TS 9 size and after a quick search, I found a relatively cheap 4G LTE antenna with a long
enough cable for me to have the antenna on a pole at the stern of Alice and the router
inside.
There are four main mobile data network providers in the UK. EE has the fastest download
and upload speeds. Vodafone, is the second fastest, Three and then the slowest
which is O2.
I researched and purchased a new EE Product called 4GEE Home Router. It's just like a
router you'd get from say British Telecom or Virgin but it uses the 4G network instead
of cables.
It's powered by a mains 230 volt to 12-volt transformer.
I'll go into how I got rid of this transformer later.
The router has two cabled LAN ports on the back along with a USB port for things like
a printer or hard drive. Under the two side flaps, there are two SMA Female sockets so
you can connect an external aerial. Although you may get a better reception from
a directional aerial, I didn't really want the hassle of standing on the roof moving
an aerial about, so opted for am Omni Directional antenna with a total of 46 decibels relative to isotropic,
or as it's known dBi.
The outer white casing contains two internal 23 dBi antennas and they have H 155 female
sockets on their bases. The 10-meter cables supplied with the antenna connect to these
H155 sockets and into the boat. On the other end of the cables are FME female sockets.
So I needed to purchase two FME male to SMA Male extension cables. Don't worry, I've listed
all the items discussed in this episode in the description below.
I conducted four tests in the same location at around 2.30 in the afternoon. I only had
2 bars out of 4 reception so it was quite a good location to run some testing. I used
a free iPhone app called Speedchecker and I connected to the faster 5 GHz internal Wi-Fi
network.
The Huawei in the window of my boat had a poor 3.5 Mb per second download speed and
a 1.59 Mb per second upload speed.
With the square external aerial the readings were faster at 6.21 Mb per second download
and 14.99 Mb per second upload
The 4GEE Home Router by the window of my boat had 17.54 Mb per second download and
9.18 Mbps upload but with new pole aerial it had a huge 56.48 Mb per second download
and 39.76 MB per second upload speed, and remember that's only with a 2 out of 4 bar
reception.
So the 4GEE Home Router was definitely worth getting along with the large external pole
type aerial. Now, of course, reception varies depending on the time of day and your location
but having done subsequent tests, these differences were about the same throughout.
Here are the prices for the items
The Huawei E5786 is around £130 The Square external aerial is around £17
The 4GEE Home Router was free on an 18-month contract.
The Omni Directional Aerial was £85.00 and the
Conversion cables were £7.00
Before I go into the EE plans that were available to me, I'd just like to point out I've had
no benefits or offers of goodwill from EE and have paid the same as you would.
There are four options to choose from for the 4GEE Home Router.
There are basically, two set amounts of data available. 100Gb per month at £45 or 200Gb
at £60. If you take out a contract for 18 months the router is free. If you choose
to have a 30-day contract the router is £99.99
I chose the 18-month contract with 200Gb of data a month.
Having a good reliable internet connection on your boat, caravan or motorhome doesn't
need to cost hundreds of pounds. You could ignore all the kit altogether and simply
use your mobile phone as a hotspot if your contract has enough data.
Personally, I've been really impressed with the new 4GEE Home Router and aerial combination and have
had really good speeds wherever I travel.
Come On.
Be Sensible
Come On. Up.
Good girl. You worked it out in the end.
As the 4GEE Home Router has a 230-volt transformer down to 12 volts, I decided to supply the
router with 12 volts from the boats DC circuit. This is great as I don't need to run the inverter
all the time simply to keep the Wi-Fi going.
However, when my engine is running and the alternator is on, the voltage can get up to
as high as 14.7 volts so I added a voltage regulator into the feed to force the voltage
stays at 12 volts. This then connects into the standard DC 2.1mm jack socket and remains
permanently on.
This episode is dedicated to two new Patreon top level subscribers and they are
Candace Darden from Georgia in the United States
and Pema Thubten from Wellington in Australia
Stickers have already been despatched and Thank You so much!
If you've not already subscribed, please do, it doesn't cost you anything and by clicking
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