[israces]

Can I take the airport card out of my TiPB and put in another manufacturer's 802.11a/b/g card? Do they even make card that I can plug the internal antenna into like the current Airport card?

Ideas?

[JB72]

Originally posted by israces:
Can I take the airport card out of my TiPB and put in another manufacturer's 802.11a/b/g card? Do they even make card that I can plug the internal antenna into like the current Airport card?

Ideas?

I don't think so. I'm surprised Apple just can't make a 802.11g that fits in the original Airport slot, but that appears to be the situation afaik, sadly.

One option would be to use a PC Card 802.11g, assuming one could find a *NIX driver hack or hope IOXperts starts supporting some 802.11g cards.

It seems somewhat an inelegant solution, but it would probably have the advantage of extending wireless range, especially in the original models.

[israces]

Sure. But the key thing I was going for here was using the internal "slot." Is the airport slot set so that it will only accept airport cards and no others, or is it just a driver issue for the OS?

What about using a 802.11g card from the airport card manufacturer? Similar enough in function to work, just at a higher speed? It's Lucent isn't it?

[Peter]

Originally posted by israces:
Can I take the airport card out of my TiPB and put in another manufacturer's 802.11a/b/g card? Do they even make card that I can plug the internal antenna into like the current Airport card?

Ideas?

Doesn't the TiPB have two PCMIA cards?

[Drakino]

Originally posted by JB72:
I don't think so. I'm surprised Apple just can't make a 802.11g that fits in the original Airport slot, but that appears to be the situation afaik, sadly.

The Airport slot is a PC Card slot. PC Card slots are the ISA slots of laptops. They work fine for slow devices. But when going to something like 802.11g that can theoriticially do 54mb, the PC Card slot becomes the bottleneck. Thus, a PCMCIA card that can do 802.11a/g will be a CardBUS card.

Apple by what I understand went with a miniPCI style AirportExtreme card instead of a cardbus slot, probably due to miniPCI being easier to implement. Every Cardbus slot needs its own controller chip, where as a miniPCI device can simply be wired into the existing PCI bus on the machine and share the same PCI controller chip the integrated devices use.

[tullamore]

The other companies make g cards that Apple COULD sell to put into the TiBook, sure it wouldnt be able to run at 54mbs but it would still be faster than 11. This is probably the reason they aren't not selling them is that so many people would complain about the performance of their g cards.

[israces]

Originally posted by Drakino:
The Airport slot is a PC Card slot. PC Card slots are the ISA slots of laptops. They work fine for slow devices. But when going to something like 802.11g that can theoriticially do 54mb, the PC Card slot becomes the bottleneck. Thus, a PCMCIA card that can do 802.11a/g will be a CardBUS card.

So that's a "no?" Are we sure the PC Card slot cannot support the 54Mbps? Does it even really ever do 54 Mbps or is that just the theoretical top speed under controlled lab conditions?

[Paco500]

The internal PC Card slot's bandwidth tops out at 16Mb a sec (not bet your life sure, but pretty darn sure that's the number) so there would be almost no advantage to going 802.11g, so very few people would buy them, so why manufacture them?

I think the killer product would be a bluetooth card that went in the airport slot. Go 802.11g via Card Bus (finally get decent range on my TiBook) and fill the internal slot w/ bluetooth.

I'd buy that.

[israces]

I agree. I remember some guy doing a hack with putting a Bluetooth USB dongle in a powerbook after hijacking one of the USB ports from the inside. I'd rather find a card that uses the existing internal hardware if I can.