Wifi Boosters

Anyone have any good experience with wifi boosters. The marina supplies a public connection but I don’t get any reception down in the cabin.
I want to be able to stream to a smart tv and lap top.

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BonesD said:

Anyone have any good experience with wifi boosters. The marina supplies a public connection but I don’t get any reception down in the cabin.
I want to be able to stream to a smart tv and lap top.

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Do you have a steel boat? Just thinking if the signal is that weak not sure there is enough signal for streaming. At the dock email and internet surfing is no problem. Try to stream and it may work one day and not the next. Boosting that signal will only carry it below, not improve it. IMO
Of course of you have already done streaming up in the salon, then that is different.

I used a PDQ on my last boat. It helped a little to amplify the Marina's WIFI, but quite frankly I was a little underwhelmed when cruising. I was never able to pick up an open wifi like the advertisements claim. I may try another system on this boat as I am on a mooring outside of the normal reach of my Marinas wifi signal.

Getting the antenna up and outside by installing some sort of booster will help with range.

But not bandwidth. You want to stream video. In my experience, very few free marina WiFi installations are sized for that sort of thing. Often they share one "business class" internet connection with the marina office. Two or three people streaming will drive the performance for everyone down the drain. Then even those who just want to check e-mail or view a web page or two will suffer.

For streaming, we've had far better luck with an unlimited data cell plan.

Used to be back in the day, you could pick up (steal) open WIFI connections while cruising and WIFI amplifiers helped a little. Nowadays, nobody in their right mind leaves their WIFI unprotected by passwords.

I use WiFi Ranger in my RV and am very pleased. I’ll do the same on my MS350

We use a Ubiquiti Bullet, which is easy to mate with a nice antenna on the flybridge. Ethernet cable to a Wifi access point below (we use an old Apple Airport Extreme, which still works great) and voila, your boat has its own wifi that you can connect to another wifi network from many hundreds of yards away. Even when you can't connect to the internet, the wifi is useful to link, say, a Roku to a Synology NAS acting as a video server.

The Ubquiti device and a 4ft antenna will maintain a strong link to the marina wifi (or a phone hotspot, for example), and the wifi access point will share that link with devices on the boat.

Thanks for the replies.
Before I turned my boat around to face the winter winds the TV streamed video just fine even though it was further away from the marina transmitter. Not by much.
The difference is the tv was facing the transmitter up through the pilot house with nothing much between besides the back doors made of wood and glass.
The boat is fiberglass and wood and now there is a thick bulkhead, the outside hull and deck n the way. Neither my phone or lap top will connect like this either.

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