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March 31, 2003

Wireless Airport

I've been using an Apple Titanium PowerBook for about two years now as my primary computer. It travels pretty much everywhere I do, and has proven to be more reliable and stable than most other things in my life. Well except for the wireless access option.

I have a good old Airport card installed in this machine, and have had nothing but horrible headaches with it form day one. Many of the times, the throughput for the card is just not there. I know it's not congestion on the network because an adjoining machine can get the same page in about... 1/10 of the time. Sometimes it seems that an outgoing connection isn't really even going to be attempted, but Camino (for example) will insist that it's trying (this has been verified with a network sniffer). If I wish to use Virtual PC with my airport card I may as well forget it. Compile an application and surf the web? Not a chance. The network just disappears.

I don't believe the applications are at fault at all, but rather the card, or the antenna. Why? Recent behavior has begun to make me think this. The base station sits a mere 15 feet away from me with an unobscured line of sight. The only lead I can think of is within the paint on the walls (possibly) to block the signal. Yet I can watch the signal fluctuate from a high level to nothing depending upon the angle of the laptop.

Friends can pick up numerous other networks yet, my TiBook shows no signal or trace of them. This has to stop, as it is more annoying than a Jerry Lewis telethon. I opened up the TiBook looking for a possibly loose antenna wire, but found none. In fact the antenna has been tapped down to ensure no slippage. I tried to re-seed the Airport card, no luck there either. So I did something bad, I booted the machine without the bottom cover. Reception was flawless everywhere in the room. Even more amazingly, I discovered 3 other wireless networks near me. How nice!

So the question to any readers out there, is there a way to hack an external antenna onto a Ti PowerBook's internal Airport card? What I noticed is that since I have no need for the PCMCIA card slot I could potentially snake a new antenna out of there, or up through the air vent on the side. I'd have to find a good L shaped PigTail connector though, and would enjoy hearing any suggestions.

Seattle Wireless has a good list of links towards PigTails, but doesn't seem to have any suggestions for hacking an Airport.

Posted by Dan at March 31, 2003 04:41 PM

Comments

Posted by: Wacky at July 7, 2003 12:53 AM