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brinkey · Dec 14, 2005, 06:04 AM

Hi,

I have a snow white airport base station which is not working anymore. I took out the airport card and put it in my ibook g3 to test it. The card does show up in system profile but there is no signal to my other airport base station. Can the card be broken and is there any way to fix this?

ghporter · Dec 14, 2005, 10:50 AM

Just installing the card is not enough. Did your iBook ever have an AirPort card before?

It's quite possible for the card to be bad, but you certainly haven't given us much info to work with. What symptoms on the base station told you it wasn't working?

brinkey · Dec 14, 2005, 11:16 AM

Hi,
To clear things up: I have an ibook 600mhz which is connected via airport to a graphite base station. The card which is malfuncitoning comes out of a snow white airport base station.

My ibook has an original airport card which is working. The card out of the snow bs shows up in system profile in the ibook, but there is no airport signal and it's not possible to make a connection with my graphite base station. As far as I know I connected the card the right way and I also connected it to the internal antenna. Could it have something to do with the firmware of the airport card?

ghporter · Dec 14, 2005, 05:34 PM

The firmware could be the problem, or the card could be faulty. Why did you think the base station was not working? If it was the "flashing lights" issue (where the power supply in the base gives up and it can't boot up), then maybe it's firmware. Otherwis, I'd say the card would be suspect.

brinkey · Dec 14, 2005, 05:46 PM

Well I think the card is suspect. The base station had problems, stopped working. Therefore I took out the card. I left it for a few months and tried it in my ibook, and no luck. Any way to change the firmware on an airport card? Or to fix a broken one?

brinkey · Dec 17, 2005, 03:47 PM

Hi,

I examined both cards. The one working out of the ibook and the one out of the basestation. Noticed that the bs card has 128 bits written on it. Does this mean that this is a different card compared to the original airport card?

ghporter · Dec 17, 2005, 07:50 PM

The notation "128 bits" only means that it came from the factory equipped to handle 128-bit WEP; firmware upgrades through AirPort software updates fixed cards that weren't originally set up for that level of encryption.

My biggest question is still what was wrong with the base station? What do you mean "stopped working?"

brinkey · Dec 18, 2005, 05:00 AM

The basestation: I've got it for free because it was not working.
First thing I did was a hard reset and the station showed up via
ethernet on my G4. It was possible to fill in all the stuff needed to
get it running. The next day the base station was gone. It was not
sending a signal anymore. I can hook it to my G4 via ethernet but no
wireless connection. I tried several hard resets but it's not
possible to get it in that mode. After a hard reset the airport won't
show up via etherner neither. Plugging out and in of the power supply
brings up the station again with the name I've given to it.

ghporter · Dec 18, 2005, 04:51 PM

OUCH. That makes it hard to tell if the router part died, if the AirPort card died, if the power supply took them both out, or something else. Even money the AirPort card is at least not in great shape. Sorry...