Tag: WIFI

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New Unlimited Smarty SIM for our WIFI

In May 2021 we fitted a Huawei B311 as our internet connection, and at first we used a SMARTY SIM to get access to the internet on there 100GB for £20, but my Daughter soon used that all in the first week of our holiday and the cost of extra GB was stupid!!!, and they would not let me upgrade to a larger data plan until the first month was complete..

So we moved to EE as part of our Family tariff and during this time we put our Daughter on an unlimited data tariff (£££).

SMARTY Unlimited
SMARTY Unlimited

Well now we are back with SMARTY as they have a unlimited Data/Calls/Texts tariff SIM for just £18 per month, and so far no problems, this enables me to update the Moorings Map Page while we are travelling and not worry about watch a film etc etc.

If you are interested we have a referral link https://i.smarty.co.uk/TWt5bGx but you may find better offers if you shop around.

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WIFI on a canal boat

Wi-Fi have been researching how to add Wi-Fi on a canal boat for a while, I have started designing a system for monitoring the system onboard so that I can remotely monitor and warn me when things need attention.

But before that can start I needed to add a reliable network on the board, that can offer both WI-FI and cable networking. In my background I had been part of a team that developed an optical fibre network where we created our own wall plate network interfaces and an Ethernet switch that could work with both Plastic Optical Fibre (POF) and copper (CAT5/6) networks. Hopefully this would not be rocket science.

Huawei B311

Huawei B311 2020
Huawei B311 2020

Having read up on what was available I found a few devices that looked like they would be a starting point, and I selected the Huawei B311 as my first choice, it is a very low-cost option for what it offers. I expect I will upgrade this as time goes on, but it will get me started.

This would hopefully give me WI-FI throughout the interior of the hull.

The unit comes with a 240V to 12V mains power adapter, so should be no problem adapting this to run on the boats 12v supply.

I expect we will need an external antenna at some point to get a good signal due to the steel construction of the hull, but we will see, at present our phones seem to work very well inside the boat.

DATA SIM

Next we needed to find a data SIM that does not cost the earth, I tried the comparison sites  but they all the options seemed expensive it was then recommended I look at GiffGaff (on the O2 network),  who at the time offered 100 GB for £20 per month and SMARTY (on the 3 network) who had an unlimited plan for the same price, both would be completely adequate for our peak usage in the summer, with my daughter streaming films at one end of the boat and us doing the same at the other (it is not like that all the time, but you do need to cover the possibility of a wet summer in the UK).

I ended up selecting SMARTY as they also had a much cheaper smaller tariff that I will switch over to in the winter when I plan to just monitor the boat remotely.

Future Plans

This is stage one of the plan, I have in development low power remote sensors to monitor onboard systems and GPS with a movement alarm that will detect unauthorised movement. The onboard systems will send SMS messages in case of problems, else everything can be monitored by and web interface.

 

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