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TiBook Wi-Fi Range Hack: New Card
eggboard writes "Apple likes the profit margins on its internal AirPort card (still $100 three years after introduction), but the Faraday cage that is the Titanium PowerBook keeps the AirPort card and the TiBook's internal antenna from achieving the same range as the plastic-cased white dual-USB iBooks. Wired News reports today on Cliff Skolnick et al's hack, which is simply to use a 200 mW PC Card coupled with OS X-compatible drivers. The cost winds up less than an AirPort Card, and you can get a model with an external antenna jack, too."
Search the forums on Ars and you will see that a large problem with the TiBooks is that the antenna inside often shifts during transport. There is a simple fix where you find the antenna and simply push it back into the proper place and the range suddenly increases to almost iBook like quality.
p c&s=50009562&f=8300945231&m=3480972435
Wait even better, here is the thread:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=t
--- I do not moderate.
I've been using my old Lucent 802.11b PC-card in my old TiBook for some time because the internal card has such poor range.
The driver up on source forge works fine.
Fine, but how is this news?
In a new hack, area man Bob Tinklepee discovers that his iMac's power cord is "completely interchangable" with the one his PC, thus saving him the $1400 expense of replacing his iMac with a new one when the cord became frayed.
Actually, I believe the power cord on the iMac is unique and not interchangeable with the PC. Oh well, the power cord on my dual G4 is at least standard.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
If I'm having problems with range on the internal Airport card, I put in my PCMCIA card (in linux) and use that.
Don't usually need it at work or at school, but if I'm really having problems with signal strength, the PCMCIA card works much better. Also get much better reception for war driving. I love kismet
.:diatonic:.
Linux, like any monolithic kernel, gives complete privilege to drivers (including those for wireless networking devices), allowing them to crash the system at will. I suggest you invest in some cough drops.
Probably hardly at all. Radio transmitters are rather efficient in the power stages nowadays and 200mW is very low compared to the screen consumption.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Did you even read the article?
"By porting an open-source Prism driver from Berkeley Unix to OS X, McKeever was able to get Prism cards working on the Mac."
Yeah. Port a video card driver from Berkeley Unix to OS X/Darwin and you would most likely get written up on Slashdot.
A friend of mine found this fix on the macnet2.com message boards. I have tried it on 5 TiBooks so far and it works great. The fix involves popping out our battery and squeezing the side of the case where the serial number label is. I don't understand why it works because the antenna cable runs in the ofther direction. But it does work. I have about 4x the WiFi reception/transmission range since I fixed my TiBook.
I like *not* having an external antenna on my TiPB. My laptop constantly goes in and out of my school bag. I prefer not having to pay extra attention to a little peice of plastic sticking out in these and other such situations.
Besides, there are ways to improve the range of the built-in card (I get great range). This discussion thread gives some interesting info.
Boom Shanka
Newton wavelan/wi-fi drivers
The power cords on the original iMacs (and every desktop Mac to date beforehand besides the cube) were industry-standard "D" plugs.
The new flat-panel iMac is also a "D" plug, but the plastic molding around it is shaped kinda funny in a cloverleaf pattern, and it plugs in flush with the back of the unit to keep from breaking any lines, design-wise.
You could take a dremel/exacto and a lot of patience to a standard power plug and it would work. But it would be really, really ugly.
If worse came to worse and my cord shorted out/got chewed up by something, I'd probably order the Apple part instead of trying a hack. The new iMacs are just so nice looking, it'd be a shame to detract from it.
Dell does refuse to trouble shoot anything but an authorized configuration, meaning what they shipped, or someother setup that they support explicitly. It is a corporate standard, no touchie the insides....of course us server monkies never RTFM or follow the rules :)Although I've had real good luck with Dell support, their phone people are sharp and quite helpful.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I suppose that I don't have as much an issue with the wi-fi "hacking", per se, as much as I have an issue with it being "news"...
l oriousnoise.com/l en/
Both Ellen and Apple must be doing _something_ right - Ellen apparently has a bit of a following:
http://www.ellenfeiss.net/
http://ellenfeiss.g
http://www.wemakedotcoms.com/el
Besides, I can't tell you the number of times I've had to "hack" something on linux to make it work with something that wasn't designed to work with it anyhow - wireless cards included.
Just get a lucent Orinoco card. Stick it in an apple and it shows up as an Airport Card. The airport is simply the lucent cards without the antenna.
The lucent cards also come with a jack for an external antenna.
How is sticking a pcmcia card a hack, or even newsworthy?
Depending on the model of your power supply, pbparts.com may be helpful. I purchased a few extra cords for my iBook's yo-yo adaptor from them, although I had to look in the Pismo section to find it. (Yo-Yo Type Adapter Cord (M7332))
Go here.
Go Storage:Floppy Drives:USB.
Pick the first non-ECS product you see.
Voila, under $40, shipped. Some people pay more for software....
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I just powered down and did this fix. First time I have ever got 4 bars in my living room.
Thanks pafischer!! and Thank You Slashdot.
This rocks.
That type of cable is commonly used for Dell laptops as well. You can buy replacements here.
I'm baffled as to why this new type of cable exists in the first place. Why couldn't they use an ordinary cable?
A lot of radio devices nowadays (Some WLAN cards included) support automatic power control - Power is automatically reduced to the minimum needed for communication.
The RF portion is probably in the 20-40% range. Either way, it's a difference of maybe 2 watts consumption vs. 1 watt consumption at the worst, which is a tiny fraction of the power consumed by most laptops these days...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
These parts include: optical drives, RAM, hard drives, keyboards, mice and monitors.
Other parts such as motherboards are considered far beyond the realm of user serviceability, and require taking the machine in to a tech. While there are those of us who are capable of performing such a task, I am sure that there are many more users that cannot. If I were a manufacturer who was supplying warranties on these products, I would not want users with unknown capabilities messing with delicate ESD-sensitive components on which that I would be liable for future repairs.
Apple has been more than willing to help me with crapped-out parts, but these parts were items such as a dead Superdrive and iBook power adapter. Such parts that are allowed to be replaced can be done so easily, and save Apple a lot of cash and effort and by sending the replacements via overnight, save me a crapload of time.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
If the company spent the time and money to modify the Prism2/2.5/3 reference designs for 200 mW transmit, there's a good chance they improved receive sensitivity too.
Not sure about the Engenius card listed in this article, but it is a close relative of the Demarctech ReliaWave 200 mW card, which has a receive sensitivity spec that's significantly better (-96 dBm) than even Orinoco cards, which are one of the best ones receive-wise. FAR better than average Prism2 cards, which suck.
And you're also wrong about the antenna position - Look at the pictures in the article, the antenna is on the end of the card, it is NOT inside the box.
Lastly, the article mentions availability of an external antenna option for these cards - Not an option for the internal AirPort card.
These three things added up equals a solution that will blow away the internal AirPort configuration away.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Info on the Demarctech card:
z /r eliawave-rwz-200mw-prism2-5-pcmcia-card.html
http://www.demarctech.com/products/reliawave-rw
They get pretty good reviews on the NetStumbler forums.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The forums there have some excellent antenna discussions.
I know www.fab-corp.com has some "blade" antennas that will stick on the back of a laptop, but I'm sure these suffer from some pretty nasty pattern distortion due to the display occluding half the antenna pattern. Still, they're not too cumbersome and should be an improvement.
There are a few small "desktop" antennas available at www.fab-corp.com and www.hdcom.com (I think that second URL is correct...)
Also, even a homebrew quarter-wave "toothpick" antenna (see the NS forums) is a pretty good improvement over the internal antenna of an Orinoco or similar card. Probably wouldn't be too hard to devise a way to clip it or stick it to the back of the upper edge of a laptop's display casing.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I've had Apple overnight a HD on one occasion and on another occasion, a keyboard (coffee spill disaster). They didn't even ask for the damaged items back. All under warranty, free of charge. Apple support is O.K. in my book.
They're not propietary just because you've never used them. NuBus was an open standard developed by MIT. Apple ended up being the only one that used it.
I used to work for a school system as a technician, and I had no trouble getting replacement parts, including motherboards, from Apple. Our school district signed up with AppleOrder and AppleService which allowed us to login to their website, pick which part we needed, select if it was under warranty or not (and enter serial # so they could confirm it), and Airborne Express would be there the next morning with the replacement part. It was really very quick and easy, and was much better than dealing with Gateway when we needed a fix under warranty. I'm not sure what cost, if any, there was to use it, but considering I had to order parts twice a week from them, it really was handy.
sharkyfour.com
The problem is easily fixed, in most cases, by opening up the battery compartment by the "approximately 5 cm long plastic strip" and pressing "the side wall of the powerbook against the frame." See the posts on MacNet by webdiva at http://www.macnet2.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=1095 for the specifics.