[X4U] Airport Extreme / 3rd party wireless cards

[Stroller]

On 17 Aug 2006, at 05:02, Ronald Steinke wrote:
> ...
> If you use a third party card (of any manufacture), you may run  
> into the problem of it not being recognized by Apple's software and  
> having to buy additional drivers to make it work. I did this with  
> my old Wallstreet laptop, and I had to pay twice for the drivers  
> because I changed cards from Belkin to Orinoco brands. ...

It's not too hard to find a 3rd party wireless card that uses the  
same Broadcom BCM4306 chipset as the Airport Extreme. Whether this is  
connected via PCI (PowerMac) or Cardbus (Powerbook) one of these will  
be recognised by the OS X (as of c 10.3.5) as an "Airport Extreme  
Card" and allow configuration using Apple's standard utilities.

OS X Hax used to document currently-available AirportExtreme- 
replacement cards, but it has not been updated in some time:
   <http://www.osxhax.com/archives/cat_airport_extreme_hacks.html>

There are also some comments at MacOSXhints:
   <http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031231181743979>

This eBayer sells these cards regularly:
   <http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220017409723>
He has hidden the brand of the card by Photoshopping it, and this  
card is celarly not a genuine Apple one, but I would be confident of  
it working without 3rd party drivers.

Finally, any of these cards should work:
   <http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/iii//?s=1:i=14e44320>
however please note that some vendors change chipset without changing  
model number (eg: Belkin F5D7010 <http://pci-ids.ucw.cz/iii//? 
i=18140201>).

It looks like version 2 of the WMP54G also uses the Ralink chipset  
(as do some of Belkin's more readily available 802.11g cards), which  
is not all bad - Ralink themselves provide free drivers it under OS  
X, but it does not use Apple's native GUI.

I would try to find a card featuring the Broadcom chipset and rely  
upon Apple supporting it. I have sold a Buffalo Cardbus card that  
worked in this way and I have a SparkLAN WL-660 here which I believe  
I've tested and demonstrated to also behave as a "native" Airport  
Extreme card.

Stroller.