[sledsbehave]

i had a powerbook G4 400mhz and the range of the wireless network was just short of what i needed, it was constantly loosing connection, if moved. before that i had an ibook g3 600mhz and the range was great really.

now i am arranging to purchase a powerbook alu 1ghz with the airport extreme and i am hoping the airport range is greater.

can anyone verify a reasonable difference??

[GoCats]

I had a 15" Ti 667 that had barely 20' range... my new 17" Al has MUCH better range, like twice what my Ti had... haven't actually tested, but I have 3 bars at about 30' away whereas my Ti couldn't get a signal at all.

[SpaceRockness]

Range between Titanium vs Alu varies a bit. Its true the Alu's antennas being on the sides of the lid helped increase reception, sadly model size seems to matter and metal enclosure still results in less than perfect strength vs iBooks. My 15"(1.25Ghz) rev a alu PB receives a kick arse APE strength anywhere at home but my 12"(1.33Ghz) has heaps of drop outs mainly in my bedroom which is a room+hallway away from the APE base station and my 15" never had that happen!).

[audvidsvs]

I will add my experience here having had both Aluminum and Ti and I.
The Ti does have poor range with built-in AP but is great with a PC Card adapter.
The 12" PB is much better than the Ti but not as good as the ibook.

One strange experience I had recently was working on another 12"PB with mine sitting right next to it.
Mine would always have 1 more bar of strength than the other one evne if I swapped where they sat.
It was so bizarre to me that I took the APX cards out and swapped them to see what happened.
The high signal strength followed the card!

Then a few days later I took my card and installed it in a customers new ibook and awaited a new card for mine. The new card had even better signal strength than the one I took out,the one with the better strength from the first two.

What does this all mean?
I have no idea other than that these cards are not all created equal it seems.
I have taken a lot of these machines apart too and I can easily imagine the antennae not all being exactly the same inside them for a variety of reasons.
The stupid little connector also seems like a variable to me.
All I do know is that it can vary widely making it tough to be satisfied once you know it.

[markponcelet]

Wireless cards are tricky. First of all, the most important factor in a wireless card is something that almost no manufacturer will talk to you about: transmitter strength. Transmitters are measured in terms of milliwatts. Almost every single card out there is horridly weak -- about 30 mw or so. In practice, this is barely enough to work inside a house or an office.

There are high-power cards out there, weighing in at about 200 mw. These are the cards you want. You'd have to put it in the PCMCIA slot, but if you were in a position where you needed the extra reach (such as at a WiFi hotspot), this shouldn't be too terribly inconvenient. Check out http://www.macwireless.com for a 200 mw option.

It's been a few weeks since I did a survey of cards out there. I don't think there are any 802.11g cards that are in the 200mw range yet. If there are, they'd be PC cards. No problem with that, though, as I understand there is an opensource WiFi driver floating around on SourceForge that makes most of them work on a Mac.

Bottom line, though: high-power cards make a huge difference in connectivity, stability, and yes, speed. I wish I could say how powerful the transmitters in the APE cards are, but I haven't found a good source for that info in a while. I could have sworn I saw them at 31.6 mw, which would make sense, but I could be wrong.

Also remember that the transmitter has to be strong in your base station, too. Your performance will only be as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

For a good hardware comparrison of wireless devices, see http://www.seattlewireless.net/index...wareComparison

Mark

P.S.: If you have any comments on the info up there, like if I got something horribly wrong, I'd love to hear from you. I welcome criticism. Besides, this stuff is hard to learn about.

[sledsbehave]

thanks, i guess i should've said i'm getting the 15" alu 1ghz model, so i am hoping for just the right amount of reception throughout the house.

thanks.