Neighbors, sensors, and one app
DockNeighbor is a community platform with monitoring underneath it. Here is the whole thing — who is involved, what watches the boat, and what happens when something goes wrong at three in the morning.
The four moving parts
The neighbors
People, not hardware. You invite the ones you would call anyway — the liveaboard two slips down, your partner, the mechanic who knows the boat. They join free, whether or not they own a single sensor.
The sensors
Off-the-shelf flood, voltage, power and climate sensors on the boat’s own Wi-Fi, plus the GPS already in your cellular gateway. Nothing proprietary, nothing marine-priced.
The app
Web, macOS, Windows and Android. Aboard, it talks to your hardware directly over the local network. Away, it follows you — same view of the boat, wherever you are.
The watch
When nobody has the app open, the cloud keeps watching and does the fanning out — so an alarm at 2 a.m. finds you and the neighbors you chose.
The two paths, on one picture
Aboard, the app talks to your hardware directly — no internet required. Away, the cloud watches and reaches out. Lose the marina Wi-Fi and the local half keeps running.
What happens when something goes wrong
This is the part that makes it a neighborhood rather than a monitoring box: an alarm is not addressed to one phone.
-
The sensor trips
Water in the bilge, a battery sagging toward the point where the pump stops, shore power dropped, the anchor outside its swing circle. The sensor reports in seconds.
-
You hear about it, wherever you are
Push on your phone with the app closed, on every plan including Free. Paid plans add email destinations; Weekender and Voyager add WhatsApp and SMS.
-
So do your neighbors
The alarm fans out to the friends you have marked as notifiable — on Free and Dockside that is one of them; Weekender and Voyager reach up to five. They see what tripped and where the boat is.
-
Somebody who is fifty feet away can act
That is the entire point. Distance is the thing that turns a nuisance into a loss, and your dock is the only party that has never been far away.
-
And on city water, the boat acts for itself
On a paid plan with a LinkTap valve, a flood alarm closes the valve automatically — locally when a device is on your network, from the cloud when you are away.
Getting the boat online — and the signal around it
DockNeighbor can only reach your neighbors if the boat can reach the internet. That is two separate problems: getting a connection to the boat, and getting the signal around it. The second one is what actually breaks, and it is usually free to fix.
Your flood sensor is the one to watch
It sits in the worst spot on the boat and has the hardest job. To save battery it sleeps completely, then has to wake up and connect from scratch every time it reports. A mains-powered sensor can quietly retry a weak connection all day; a sleeping sensor gets one shot. If you fix coverage anywhere, fix it in the bilge.
Move the router
The single biggest win, and it costs nothing. Gateways end up shoved in a locker or behind a metal panel — both of which kill signal. Get it up, out, and roughly central. Try this before you buy anything.
Add an external antenna
Most LTE gateways worth owning have screw-on antenna connectors. A better antenna, mounted somewhere with a view, beats a stubby one buried in a cabinet every time.
Add one repeater or access point
A single extra Wi-Fi node covers most boats. Put it between the router and whatever is struggling — usually the bilge or a far cabin.
Fix the settings, not the hardware
Sensors are 2.4 GHz only. A lot of "out of range" problems are really a sensor failing to join a combined 2.4/5 GHz network. Give 2.4 GHz its own network name, pin it to a fixed channel, and turn off band steering.
Cellular routers, SIM plans, marina Wi-Fi and the off-season standby trick are covered in full in the connectivity documentation.
Ready to see it?
Join free, invite a neighbor or two, and add sensors whenever you want them.