Just finished setting up my new Buffalo AirStation WBR2-G54 and their 54g PMCIA card (WLI-CB-G54A.) They work flawlessly together and the reception is great. You can set the base station to broadcast up to 100 mW, so if you wish to minimize your exposure to "stumbling" you can throttle it down. You can also hide the SSID, enable WPA, even setup a series of AirStations with WDS. The wireless PC-card is supported natively in Panther, just shows up as an Airport card in my Titanium. I got rid of the internal card long time ago, because of the absolutely dismal range. The Cisco Aironet 350 has excellent range, which the Buffalo card appears to come close to, though I'll be doing some comparisons in the next week. The AirStation WAN port is 10/100, not that that makes much difference since the cable modem is 10 only.
One feature worth mentioning: You can enable a "Privacy separator" which means that wireless clients can't talk to each other. If someone stumbles the wireless access, they can't see my Ti.
The AirStation is $20 after rebate at outpost.com until October 31, and you can get the wireless card at target.com for $30. Just be sure that the wireless card product number ends with an "A" because the "L" card is NOT the Mac card (windows only--probably doesn't use the Broadcom chip and so isn't natively supported in Panther.)
One main advantage for me is that the combination supports Appletalk over the wireless portion--which most WAP or wireless cards no longer support (other than Apple's, that is.) Printing to my Laserwriter 16/600 has now gotten a whole lot easier, because IP printing was getting flaky in Panther, for no obvious reason.
The combination is replacing an SMC Barricade and a Cisco Aironet 350. The range is about the same, perhaps only a difference of 2 points in MacStumbler or Kismac at the distances I've measured so far. Some reports seem to indicate that 54g range throughput falls off at a steeper rate than 11b cards, so I'll be looking into that in the next few days.
I have a Lucent Range Extender antenna left over from when I was trying to extend the range of my original graphite and internal airport card. The antenna works with either the AirStation base unit or the wireless card. The 2 internal antennas in the AirStation are already excellent (I found reviews online giving it top marks for antenna range) and my experience is that attaching the antenna to the WAP doesn't make much difference to the range. I suspect that attaching the antenna to the wireless card will yield better results, but I haven't had much time to really explore that side yet. One thing that I miss from the Cisco Aironet is being able to adjust the transmit power on the card itself. I usually had it set at 30 mW, but it could be set up to 100 mW. I'm going to try it with the AirStation, to see how the throughput handles at different distances. The Buffalo wireless card can't be adjusted because the Ti sees it as an Airport card.
Can't beat the price and the features...especially when I think of the dismal graphite and internal airport card.
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