Wi-Fi on a steel hulled ship 1

[gezlee]

I am going to install a Wi-Fi system a historical ship. The ship has 1/4 inch thick steel all over the place, the WI-FI is going in the office area for visiting restoration workers to access internet. Will the steel cause any interference with the wireless signal? If so, does anyone have a remedy?

 

[bcastner]

You likely will not have much distance outside of the office, area, and a lot of multipath. But my guess inside the office area it will work just fine.

 

[G0AOZ]

Is your office area completely open plan, or will you have to contend with partitioned areas built with this 1/4 inch steel plate? If it's a working ship on the high seas, I wonder if the ship's radar sigs could be an issue...

ROGER.

 

[gezlee]

GOAOZ,
The ship is actually decomissioned and has been parked, literally, in the dirt. Wi-Fi is going in an area under the fan tail set up as the office for the restoration/preservation team and visiting reservist. The only partition is between the berthing area and the office/eating area.

 

[bcastner]

I would use the Linksys WRT54G family of routers, and Sveasoft third-party firmware. The reason being that you may want to lower the output power of the router to adjust to the massive amount of multipath signals you likely will have.

The steel "cage" you will be in pretty much gaurantees from reflection good coverage. Perhaps too good, hence the reason to perhaps tone it down a bit. Try the router of the box, it should work fine. Keep in mind that there are firmeware options to adjust output power:

http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/index.php

The freeware version of their firmware should be sufficient if you need to adjust output power.