2016 Brexit referendum was quite a turning point.

Isn't the whole point of ultralight to shave all the extra weight off your kit so that you can pack some luxuries with you (in your case cast iron pan, in mine, some wine and cheese)

I’ve been to both Petsamo and Karelia, and trust me, we don’t want them back. To clean them up and bring them into modern standards of infrastructure would be ridiculously expensive. Not to mention the Russian population that has integrated in them over the last 80 years.

The cost development of solar is just incredible. We almost doubled the solar capacity on our boat this summer for just couple hundred euros.

For the past year, all of our electricity has come from renewable sources (mostly solar, though we also have small wind and hydro generators on the boat that do contribute when conditions are right). And this includes things like satellite internet, refrigeration, and making all our domestic fresh water through desalination.

The previous year’s flagship is one option. Samsung’s S22 and S22+ both fit in this range, and even the S22 Ultra is not too far off. And those still have a few OS updates left. Pixel 6 Pro seems to sell for the same price as 7a in Germany.

This has been my strategy for the last two phones (Note 8 and Note 10) and it has worked great. Following this thread with interest as this is the year I’m due to upgrade.

We have a Meshtastic repeater (CLIENT_BASE) in our sailboat mast. We've gotten ~12NM range with that

This was my primary device for a couple of years. I didn’t have a phone at all. I could do everything I needed to do. Camera quality was of course terrible, but I had one of those Sony “lens cameras” paired with it, and that worked great.

I even sailed across the Atlantic with the Nexus 7 as my only media device (I packed a Kindle but it died a week in).

That is why I’m considering a foldable now. If only they weren’t so fragile…

Nexus 7 (FHD, the better model) was the best tablet I've had. I used it even as a phone replacement for a couple of years.

Now I'm using a Galaxy Tab Active 3 as a chartplotter on the boat. Also quite nice, but would be too slow for a "main device". Not to mention camera quality.

Sweden did, once, though admittedly with quite long versions of butter knives

The Kronan museum in Kalmar is also pretty interesting

If a bottle of wine and some cheese takes your hike from a 3-star experience to a 5-star experience, you need it.

Boxed wine, mind you. It is still !ultralight after all 😅

There's plenty of ways to visit countries that won't involve flying. Some of those quite CO2 neutral.

Get a pressure cooker, and cooking any dried beans becomes quick and easy.

For chickpeas, we often do curries. This one is great, too: https://www.budgetbytes.com/sriracha-hummus/

I have a Raspberry Pi running Signal K on the computer. This transmits all boat sensor data (depth, wind, GPS, AIS targets, etc) to the tablet. On tablet I can then run a chartplotter app, for example Navionics, SeaPilot, OpenCPN, or my current option, Orca CoPilot.

There's a whole set of articles analysing this one: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/legion-and-phalanx/

Windy for weather.

In Finland, Sailmate for the official sea charts.

We sailed with Navionics for several years, but now switched to Orca. Better AIS, weather routing, clearer charts.

I've been very happy with our Spinlocks. Comfortable for keeping them on the whole day. We crossed the Atlantic on a boat that had them, and later bought the same for our own boat.

The apps are getting better. Columba is quite promising, as is https://github.com/thatSFguy/reticulum-mobile-app

And of course the chat aspect is only one of the things you can do with Reticulum. I'm hosting my "own GitHub" vai rngit for instance.

I've been using the Signal K anchor alarm for a couple of years now. Very reliable so far. But of course only as good as the GPS source of your system.

I find around the 8” mark to be the perfect tablet size. However, not a lot of good options out there, especially for more high end hardware. If money is not an issue, a foldable might do it?