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September 09, 2003
Fun With WiFi
After all the trouble, the Ti Airport Whip Antenna has finally arrived in all it's non-splendor. Initial inspection showed that it wasn't exactly how I had figured it would be. From the literature I had understood (somehow) that the antenna was a removable piece, so that you didn't need to always having it hanging out of your laptop. The other bit I understood to be true was that you could continue to use the internal antenna already installed. Neither understanding proved to be true in the end.
Installation took a few minutes of time. Most of it was trying to detach my Airport card to make life easier while installing the new antenna (this isn't a required step). Once installed I ran the provided iStumbler program, noticed that I was able to get more than just one network, but rather I was now picking up 3 (a LinkSys and a 3Com). It's taken a little bit of work, but I've narrowed the "default" (LinkSys) network down to a access point across the street that is completely open. I've been enjoying the across street Internet access for a little bit now.
Now some of the problems with it, beyond the wire sticking out of my pretty TiBook. It seems that WiFi generally slows down the entire computer more than I've realized, and has really confused the Mail.app (click "Send Later" and then again, and again and again and... ). This can be seen with Mail.app's retrieval of mail, Solitaire Till Dawn's animations, and even in general websurfing. Many of the faults/problems of web surfing are also apparent again with page requests not always being sent the initial time, but the browser understanding them as having been sent. The bigger problem is that my Airport seems to at random not be able to sync with the base station. For example it will lose it's DNS, or the uptime of my local base station. Once this happens of course the entire wireless connection is worthless and needs to be restarted. I haven't figured out what's causing this yet.
Posted by Dan at September 9, 2003 02:16 PM
Comments
certain places as many as 60 open networks are available (I saw on TV)
Posted by: chris at March 18, 2004 04:06 AM