[Ti] TiBook and Airport Card

[Jesse Girard]

Hi Ken:

I've been running my 500MHz TiBook with a WiFi connection for about a year 
now, first with Apple's original Airport base and later using a Linksys 
WAP54G wireless access point. In both cases the wireless hub was on one 
level of my home and my wife and I have good connectivity regardless of 
where we are in the house, up to roughly 30 meters away (and most of the 
time) on the 2nd floor!

My wife has the older G3 400MHz Powerbook (the one with the bronze keyboard 
keys and the USB port, no Firewire port - "Pismo", maybe? Can't remember) 
and it works fine, too.  For her machine I had to purchase a different 
PCMCIA wireless card because the original card couldn't "see" the WAP54G 
(the maker said it should, but it didn't) and I didn't want to have two 
different base stations running at the same time... double base stations 
worked fine, by the way, until the new PCMCIA card arrived.

I wonder if the connection between your internal Airport card and the 
separate antenna is not good. Can you get in there and look at them? Can 
you take them apart and try re-connecting them? My TiBook came without the 
Airport card installed, so I had to install the card and connect it to the 
antenna.

In view of the low power levels involved, a connection problem between the 
card and the internal antenna could give you severe signal degradation. As 
you carry the TiBook away from the base the signal strength declines as the 
inverse square of the distance, so moving from 10 to 20 feet away reduces 
signal strength by 75%, or moving from 10 to 40 feet away reduces signal 
strength by 93.75%.
So if the antenna isn't connected, or isn't properly connected, as you move 
away from the base station you would almost certainly lose the RF link 
between the laptop and the base.

I'm not sure what "aligning" or massaging the antenna would accomplish, 
unless there are breaks in the antenna which one might reconnect by moving 
things around. Sounds like it could just as easily make matters worse...

Jess Girard
Amateur Radio Call ND1L



At 09:23 AM 06/17/2003 -0700, Ken Zelasko wrote:

>I am having the following problem with my TiBook and Airport connection.

[balance deleted for brevity]