I have a summer cottage on Gambier Island near Vancouver. Actually it’s my wife’s cottage, but she sometimes lets me use it. One of the problems with the cottage is that it doesn’t have land access, electricity, or phone service.

The first problem was easy to deal with. You have a boat to get back and forth, or take the water taxi. The 2^nd problem was fairly easy to fix as well, with a bunch of coast guard surplus solar panels and a bunch of forklift batteries supply an inverter, and bingo – power.

The phone was a problem until the advent of the cell phone. Till that time one had to rely on a marine band telephone which was like having one huge party line shared by dozens of people. You had to wait your turn, and that could take hours.   So when the cell phone became an option, that took over, and since we’re only a few miles from town, all calls are local.

The problem of internet was a little more tricky. I solved that with by purchasing a Nokia 6161i cell phone. This was in the ADSL days before digital came in. The Nokia 6161i had a built in modem, so you could attach it to your laptop with a cord from the phone to the serial port and use the phone as a cell modem. One could find cheap dial up services for under $10.00 and you were in business. It wasn’t fast – about 9600 baud, but it worked. For years I had a line up of neighbor’s kids begging to check their hotmail accounts.

Unfortunately last year Rogers informed all their remaining ADSL clients that they would no longer support ADSL. They offered a free digital phone to their clients, but that didn’t solve my problem.

I spent many fruitless hours on the phone with Rogers, Telus and Bell trying to find an inexpensive solution. Their were data packages, but they were EXPENSIVE!   An additional fifty bucks a month, and a surcharge per megabit. If you wanted to send a few photos, you’d have to take out a mortgage! 

Of course I could use my cell phone’s browser capabilities or breakdown and buy a blackberry, but as a writer I LIKE working from my laptop and not squinting at a tiny screen – and besides I know how to actually type.

As I mentioned we’re fairly secluded and so WIFI seemed out of the question until one day my wife caught a fleeting moment of connectivity coming from 2 miles across the water on Bowen Island.

I now realized that if I could boost the signal I might have at least the possibility of regaining internet contact.   Having been a radio Ham at one point in my life I knew about Yagi antennas. I did a quick search on eBay, and sure enough I found several venders selling Wifi Yagi antennas for about $130.00   I picked a vender in Quebec and chatted with him about my problems. He offered me a money back guarantee. If I couldn’t get it to work or find a place to connect to, I could send it back.

A few days later a box arrived by UPS. It contained a three foot long piece of foam core with a series of short brass rods protruding. At the end of the unit was a sealed wifi card and emanating from that was a 24 foot  length of USB cable. The whole unit couldn’t have weighed a pound. It also had mounting brackets so you could mount it on a mast, and it had a tripod connection as well (like you have on your camera) so you could mount it on a light tripod. The package contained a mini-cd with the USB drivers.

I put the unit on a camera tripod on the deck, ran the cable through the window, installed the software and hooked up the cable, and instantly had four   WIFI sites of varying strength. Two of them had my favourite name Lynksys and “Default” – which meant they weren’t encrypted.   The strength was only about 30% but the quality was about 75% which meant that I had a connection. 

The connection is almost as fast as it is at home, almost instant – however because of the distance and the fact that there are occasional dropouts – caused oddly by the weather, and trees on the far side, the signal occasionally drops out. I installed a few program called Netstumbler and used that to aim the antenna when I mounted it on a mast on the roof.

I had a 2^nd unit which I took to a neighbor who had a much better view over the water – nearly 180 degrees compared to my 90 degrees, and we got nearly 20 sites there. Of course this brings up the issue of “Stealing internet.”  My personal opinion is that the site is open for one of two reasons. First, the person, like many, doesn’t mind sharing or is too lazy or ignorant to take the 2 minutes it takes to encrypt their Wifi.

In my case it’s become moot, because a new site named “Free Internet access” has appeared, and I use that when I can.

So, if you’re in an area where Wifi seems out of question, you might want to check out the USB WFI Yagi at http://www.innovativedevice.com/asp/information.asp