The project of the day was to make permanent the wireless Internet network on the boat. I finally got around to removing the bubble gum and duck tape, and drilled holes to route all the antenna wires for the CAT 12 Dual modem wireless router. I also made progress on the IC-7100 ham radio. That should be finished tomorrow.

This standard RingCentral office IP phone gets me access to my office’s direct dial number, it is powered by PoE (Power over Ethernet). First phone call from here on the dock was to my brother Russ in Maine who reported the the voice quality was “very clear”… I had him on speaker phone too.

Down in the salon, (aka living room), or in the VIP “guest” stateroom I can also use my “soft phone” on the laptop computer for business calls and Zoom meetings. (Regardless of where I am working, the soft phone is actually used a LOT more than the regular office phone.)

On the to-do list:

I have to put a label on this telephone NOT to use it for 911 calls! Regardless of where our boat is in the world, emergency crews would be dispatched to my office at 5 Penn Plaza in midtown Manhattan!

This shows the storage bin up on the flybridge which has been converted to an IT Closet. Contents: Pepwave CAT 12 Duo modem Internet router, PoE injector for telephone, Icom 7100 multi-band multi-mode base unit (ham radio). Six coax cable antenna leads come into this space for these devices.

The two rabbit ear “paddles” are WiFi antennas.

Here you can see 8 antenna feed line cables coming into the IT closet from the sun deck railings where all the antennas are mounted.

There is a lot of valuable storage space being reallocated to “COM”. But that is part of what defines us on this boat!

• Marine VHF
• Marine SSB
• Amateur Radio HF, VHF, UHF (aka HAM Radio)
• WiFi. (2 GHz + 5 GHz)
• LTE cell networks 4G + 5G (VZW & T-Mobile SIM cards)