Oh man, SVAuspicious nailed it; He made some very good points, but also missed a few things: the video and audio quality were horrible, the editing was bad, and that poor girl in the video had a black eye - she was probably beaten for mispronouncing Ethernet (a cardinal sin - let's hope her geek card was revoked for that.)
There's actually a good story behind this video. We filmed this while sailing in the Caribbean after being asked by several other sailors and friends if we could explain our setup. We didn't sell the video (as SVAuspicious pointed out, who would pay for this level of quality), nor have we made any money from parts. It was simply put together to help others out per their request. We hobbled our system together, while sailing, from parts that friends brought down. Jessica was beaten up by our top loading fridge when a wave knocked the boat around and the door corner hit her square under the eye as she pulled away. It was a good shiner and lasted for weeks - which we captured nicely on video for posterity.
At the time, all we had was a 5v router. We didn't have a voltage regulator so I took apart a cell phone charger, got out the soldering iron, and made a make-shift regulator (I'm not recommending this as the first one melted due to lack of power output. Two in parallel did the trick. We didn't have access to Radio Shack while in the Carib – so we made what we had work.) Buying a router that will run directly off of 12 volts will save parts and time - and is a great recommendation.
As for the PEO (Power over Ethernet - make sure you pronounce it correctly!) there are lots of options. The one we used was about $15 and measured a few inches by a few inches in size. For the benefit of the community I'd love to see a new parts list compiled (since ours is over two years old and clearly lacking). Maybe SVAuspicious can help us out with his recommendations. We spent about $120 for our setup. The bullet was around $80 and the antenna was $20ish. We already had the router and Cat 5. The POE was $15, and I built the voltage regulator from parts on board.
At the time (and this still may be the case) the bullet didn't come with any instructions. The firmware for the bullet is crude and slightly un-user friendly. Configuration of the bullet could be a whole topic in itself. The hardware installation is fairly simple and can be done in less than an hour if all goes well. When we put ours together, there just wasn't a lot of info on this topic. So if SVAuspicious is up to the challenge, here's what I would love to hear more about:
1) Which db Antenna would you recommend and why? 12db worked well for us, but perhaps there's a better choice? As the db increases so does the range, but at the loss of reception radius. Since boats rock and swing, a compromise must be met.
2) What's the ideal mounting height? Some recommend the mast, but the higher you go, the more swing you introduce into the antenna. It's also easier to maintain from lower, so we mounted ours on the bimini top.
3) Which parts would you recommend on your setup? Specific items listed are nice for people. Many people will make their own selections based on what you recommend. But others will want an easy to follow list and follow it exactly.
I think this is a great topic that should be updated and explored. More and more cruisers are looking for solutions to pick up internet aboard their vessels and the options out there can be confusing.
As for the video being on eBoat Listings, well they didn't pay for the video. We built and launched eBoat Listings as a passion and to meet the need we found while searching for our boat - which was a need for better search tools. We took the input from others sailors we met along our trip and combined that with what we wanted to see in a site (and we'd love to hear input from any boaters out there that wouldn't mind sending us their opinions on how to make things better!).
After we launched eBoatlistings officially this year, we moved the video from our personal sailing blog to our site blog. We're hoping one day we'll be able to buy another boat and sail off into the sunset again - this time running our business from the boat using our long range Wi-Fi that SVAuspicious is going to help us setup
correctly. No pressure