Check out the Thrane&Thrane Sailor Iridium Pilot (ex OpenPort) data and voice comms sytems. Around $5k for the terminal which provides phone and 100kbps-ish internet.

If you need more than that the FleetBroadBand 500 has been very solid for us but the terminal is $16k and data is $9/mb.

Raymarine's new NMEA2000 (seatalk ng) equipment is pretty versatile, but the shiny new E series gear is not very rugged. The C90 is still available and is a solidly built performer. Raymarine also just announced class A and B AIS transponders. Handy having all the sensors on one network, all feeding blended data to all of your plotters.

Stay away from Garmin RADAR. They emit a lot of noise and interfere with VHF. They're priced where they are for a reason.

Standard Horizon GX5500 DSC radio is affordable and works. I run these on west coast 'hard use' vessels with a totally reasonable failure rate. Don't skimp on the coax. It's worth it to pay for LMR200, RG223, or RG400 for your main VHF antenna run, and don't ever ever use those crap Shakespeare compression RF fittings.

EPIRB is nice to have, but someone's got to come looking for it to be of real use. Many parts of the world don't have any real SAR capacity, so its utility becomes a bit moot.

Spot or an equivalent may be a better choice, depending on where you're going, and who you want to keep updated.

Cellular modems and the newer integrated hubs are handy if you've got a good data plan. I've had good success with the 4G NETGEAR MVBR1210C Turbo Hub on littoral vessels. These offer both data and a phone port.

If you do the wifi thing, consider putting a well sealed Ubiquity BulletHP on an antenna up the mast. Very cheap and surprisingly effective radios.

Here's the problem with that: China don't give a shit about your patent, and will produce your design and offer it for sale cheaper than the cost of your raw materials. Good luck with that lawsuit.

Uh, no? Steam has an offline mode.

This is the largest part of the problem. No one envisioned terrestrial services of this nature in this band when GPS was being created.

Have you seen the photos of the WD factory? The water was near the ceiling on the ground floor. Vehicles in the loading bays were submerged to the roofline. This was a significant flood event.

They already have much better ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC-12_Guardrail

Insects have antennae; radios use antennas. Sorry, pet peeve.

Funny how they can say this with a straight face knowing full well they've already lost.

You do know that microwave ovens operate in the same frequency band as 2.4 GHz wifi, right? They're usually centered around ch.9 in the wifi spectrum.

Maybe those that aren't cursing are lucky enough to not have to toil in a shitrix environment over a skinny latent link. Oops, did that sound bitter?

One of the main reasons I quit facecrack over a year ago was when I saw my face on a classmates banner ad at the bottom of a page.

Check out Ubiquiti's AirView product. $39 for a 2.4Ghz analyzer. No, really. I have a couple of these and they work. Granted, it's not a $24K Anritsu, but it will get you started. You may just need to switch channels, and this guy will show you if there's noise that it can hear.

Heh. Where's a boy and his flying snake when you need them?

Order yourself a nice high power jammer from dealextreme and make the problem go away. The best part is that the cellular networks are already somewhat inherently unreliable, so when you force someone's call to drop, they just accept it. It never even crosses their mind that someone could be deliberately interfering. I've heard that it's very satisfying to see the loudmouth in the train car suddenly shut up and scowl at a phone that now displays no service.

I find your analogy to be somewhat flawed. A better analogy would be like the city or municipality forcing your car open when you don't hand over the keys after you've called to have your street repaired.