Base stationless airport (again)

[Beej]

Well now that Jaguar is here and I'm moving house, this is the perfect time for me to swing into action on the wireless front. I have a few things I'd like to ask before I lay down my hard-earned money, though.

I've seen some non-Apple 802.11b cards. A lot of them promise a much greater range than Apple's cards do. These cards are offering 100m inside and 300 m outside, where I've been told that Apple's cards, without a base station, will give me about 20m.

Now, there's a couple of things I want to know about here.
1. Can I use a non-Apple card with Jaguar to set up a wireless network without a base station?
2. Does anyone have any experience with non-Apple 802.11b products, and if so, any reccomendations?
3. Are there cards that exist that will plug stright into the Airport slot on my PowerMac (or USB port), rather than taking up a PCI slot?

Thanks for the help guys.

Oh, and yes, moving house is the reason I've been so quiet around here lately. That and a crazy-ass group project at Uni. Don't worry... I'll be back at full posting strength in a week or so

 

[jelloshotsrule]

Re: Base stationless airport (again)

Originally posted by Beej
Don't worry... I'll be back at full posting strength in a week or so

oh yeah, that's what we all need

time to jump off a cliff...

 

[Beej]

Re: Re: Base stationless airport (again)

Originally posted by jelloshotsrule
oh yeah, that's what we all need

time to jump off a cliff...

O Jello,
Why do you hurt me so?

 

[peterjhill]

As a very wise man once said, "Don,t, Don't, Don't believe the hype!"

Seriously, what the marketing weenies say about the range of the airport cards should be taken with a grain of sal It. Look at these things for meaningful comparisons:

power output of the radio, lucent wavelans, for example are 30milliwatts max.
db of the antenna. Here is where the airport card could potentially shine, as the macs have built in dual antennas. If you use a pc card wireless card, it will only use the antenna on the card. Find out what the gain is.

To show you how bad the marketing can be, dlink is advertising an ap that can go 22 mbps with 256bit wep encryption. This is bull****. It is an ap with two cards in it. Unless your client has two cards in it, it will not be able to talk to more than one of ap's cards. As for the 256 bit encryption, that is just 128 x 2.

Get real dlink

 

[krossfyter]

beej and jello... are you all joking with each other or do you all hate each other ...whats up?

 

[Beej]

Originally posted by krossfyter
beej and jello... are you all joking with each other or do you all hate each other ...whats up?

Jello hates everyone, have you not learned this yet?

Just kidding... we're just playin'. Well, I am, 'cept sometimes I wonder if he is...

 

[krossfyter]

Originally posted by Beej
Jello hates everyone, have you not learned this yet?

Just kidding... we're just playin'. Well, I am, 'cept sometimes I wonder if he is...

ah okay cool...if thats the case.

rock it!

 

[jelloshotsrule]

of course i'm joking

get a grip foolio

sorry to have hijacked your thread, but i felt it was necessary, what with all your bashing of me in the past.

kross good to see you back. don't respond though. instead. shoot me a pm or email or supin. word. dawg.

 

[Taft]

This might help. I found it on slashdot. I'm looking for the other thread about non-Apple wireless cards so I can post it there too...

http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net

and from the author of the drivers about 10.2 compatability...

=-=-=
Hi all,

I've (finally) posted a build of the driver built for OS X 10.2 to my iDisk. The can be reached via the following URL: <http://homepage.mac.com/robm>

This installer is a preliminary release. I will post to SourceForge in the usual place and make an announcement to VerstionTracker once I've had a few feedback reports.

This build is, essentially, a top-of-tree build from the CVS archives. I have made several changes to it to support compilation under Jaguar and have added a few lines of code towards trying to solve the AppleTalk issue, although I haven't had any opportunity to test that yet.

Let me know how you make out with it and I'll get whatever changes done that need to be made and make a final announcement.

-Rob McKeever
robm@mac.com
=-=-=