With more and more wireless devices going on to boats, it will not be too long before your average medium sized pleasure boat has at least two or more wireless networks. One for the Internet, another for the Sat Phone, perhaps another in the new Multi-Function Display chart plotter, the list will undoubtedly keep getting longer. This is all well and good, but wireless networks have a tendency to interfere with each other and although this will not necessarily be obvious at first sight, odd packets of data will be lost, connection speeds will reduce and other degradations in network performance will occur.
With this in mind, Digital Yacht have written a new Tech Note that explains how to get your iAIS, WLN10 , WLN10HS or NavLink to connect to an existing network, rather than create their own network. This improves the performance of the main wireless network and has the added benefit of allowing you to password protect (encrypt) the wireless NMEA data with the same password as the main wireless network, which is not usually possible with these products.
What’s more, once you connect to the main network, your wireless NMEA data is immediately available without changing networks, so you can be accessing the internet and keeping an eye on AIS targets at the same time.
For those people that already have a wireless network onboard, this is the best way to connect your wireless NMEA data and for those of you who do not currently have a wireless network onboard, but would like to have a wireless router that does both NMEA data and internet connectivity, check out our latest iNavHub that does all of this in one simple box.