Beaulieu Enterprises
A five Gold Anchor marina where coverage has to reach out over water and survive everything the weather does to it.
The challenge
A working marina is an unusual Wi-Fi environment in almost every respect. Much of the coverage area is water. The users are on vessels, at varying distances and heights, and the vessels themselves move, change and obstruct. The equipment lives outdoors in salt air. And the load is seasonal — quiet for months, then thousands of visiting yachts across a season.
The requirement was coverage across the marina and the surrounding estate for staff, berth holders and visiting crews, on infrastructure that also had to carry operational systems.
What that demands of a design
Radio over water does not behave the way open ground does. A calm water surface is an efficient reflector, so a signal arrives at a vessel by more than one path — directly, and bounced off the water. Those paths can reinforce or cancel each other, and because the surface moves, the effect changes minute to minute. Clear line of sight is necessary but nowhere near sufficient, and antenna choice, height and downtilt matter far more than they do indoors.
Then there is the environment itself. Salt air is corrosive to fixings, enclosures and connectors that would last decades inland. Mounting points on pontoons and outbuildings are limited and exposed. Power and containment have to reach positions that were never designed to have equipment on them. Every one of those is a physical-installation problem as much as an RF one — which is exactly the interface where projects of this kind normally come apart.
Our approach
- Survey the water as well as the land, and design antenna type, height and downtilt for propagation over the surface rather than across a floorplate
- Specify outdoor-rated equipment, enclosures, fixings and connectors appropriate to a marine environment
- Design power and containment routes to remote and exposed positions as part of the design, not as an afterthought
- Separate staff, berth-holder, visitor and operational traffic on one physical infrastructure
- Design capacity for peak season, and validate coverage on completion
More on the engineering behind marina Wi-Fi.
Different building, same question.
If your site has a coverage or capacity problem, the first step is measuring it. Tell us about the building and we'll tell you which survey answers it.