Original Apple Airport Card Unusual Query

[Kevenly]

If anyone has an original Apple Airport card that is easy to access or laying around, it is my hope that you could answer this atypical question.

Inside the antenna connector port on the airport card itself is there a metal pin that sticks vertically upwards from the center?

When I look into the tiny antenna port on my card, I see a flat round gold/brass circular base in there but no pin sticking up. The antenna cord plug itself has the look as if it would go around a vertical pin.

I only have one card, recently acquired on the used market, so I've no other to compare it to and cannot find any picture online looking down into the tiny antenna port hole on the card.

Thank you so much to anyone willing to look into their original Apple Airport card antenna port hole for me.

 

[milton.sheaf]

There is no pin. It is simply a flat contact point. The antenna wire has a barrel shaped center that touches it there in that special place. Airport Extreme is identical in this regard.

 

[Kevenly]

Thanks so much for your report milton.sheaf!

I appreciate it so very much.

I guess there is some other reason why I can't get better than a 70% signal even when I'm in the same room as the Airport Extreme base station. It's nice to be able to scratch off "broken antenna port?" from the list of possibilities.

 

[California]

Thanks so much for your report milton.sheaf!

I appreciate it so very much.

I guess there is some other reason why I can't get better than a 70% signal even when I'm in the same room as the Airport Extreme base station. It's nice to be able to scratch off "broken antenna port?" from the list of possibilities.

The Titanium powerbook that I presume you are using...

... has a notoriously bad airport connection. Too much titanium.

Back in the day, third party companies made external antennas for them.

I can't for the life of me remember how the internal airport antenna on those computers was set up but make sure yours is in good shape.

There were also pcima third party airport cards that you could use on the Tibooks that seemed to work better because they were outside the casing.

 

[MacTech68]

The Titanium powerbook that I presume you are using...

... has a notoriously bad airport connection....

Indeed this is true. However, sometimes the issue can be "improved". If the antenna ports (inch or so long plastic inserts in the left and right hand side edges) get pushed in, you can push them back out so they are flush with the outer casing.

See the section here called "Squeezing the Battery Bay". The same applies for the other side adjacent to the CD/DVD drive but requires opening the machine.


________
vapir no2

 

[Kevenly]

I have actually tried all those crazy tricks like squeezing the antenna boards and such. For anyone who may stumble onto this thread in the forever that it will exist on the internet, there are two antenna boards on the TiBook, both located on the front sides. They put little clear plastic narrow windows over the outer computer case where the boards are.

I had previously been using a MacSense 802.11g PCMCIA card which got a very respectable signal, with data rates of over 2000 KB/sec. I needed the PCMCIA slot for a USB 2.0 controller, so I picked up the Airport card to free upt he slot. The reception is so bad that is just seems like something is wrong. I'd always heard they had bad reception but I would never imagined it was as bad as this is. It gets around 375 KB/sec max. To be literally within three feet of an Airport Extreme and still not get full bars is crazy. Strangely the signal is about the same 30 feet away as it is 3 feet away. Using iStumbler I see it hover around 70-76% at best, but I also notice something I've never seen before which is an "interference" reading almost as high as the connection strength. Maybe the Airport card is particular susceptible to interference as well.