which Wifi cards can be used for a WAP?

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005 03:03, Brian Reichert wrote:
> Some cards have an antenna built right onto the card, and others
> seem to come with a remote antenna that hangs off of a six-foot (or
> so) cable.
>
> The vendors' arguments for the cable arrangment is that it allows
> for a more optimal placement of the antenna, but other lore suggests
> that the cable itself introduces loss of signal.
>
> Does anyone have a concrete opinion on this, or can point me in the
> right direction for some research?

An onboard antenna will suck - if it's a Cardbus card it will be some dinky 
PCB dipole with minimal gain (which you can't reorient for your environment). 
If it's a PCI/mini-PCI card then it will be inside your PC and suck even more 
so they need an external antenna. (And I've never seen a [mini-]PCI wireless 
card without an antenna connector).

Lots of cards have a diversity arrangement where they have 2 RF paths, 1 is on 
the PCB and the other goes to an external antenna port. If you plug in an 
external antenna it will almost certainly get more gain and be used in 
preference. 

While cable loss can be an important factor it is usually not an issue if you 
choose appropriate cabling and antennas. It may be a problem if you need to 
do a long run (>20m) but that is pretty rare, and in that case you might want 
to consider relocating the box to be closer to the antenna (or using a USB 
wireless interface :)

I would guess most vendors reasoning for not putting an external antenna 
connector on a card is cost. Most people don't use them on Cardbus interfaces 
and they cost a reasonable amount. On my (terribly ancient) DWL-650 card it 
has PCB pads for a connector but it isn't used (the shell prevents it) but it 
was fairly easy to modify the card to have an external connector. (YMMV, 
fire/smoke warning etc)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/attachments/20050403/6ee26bee/attachment.bin