UberWiFi Powerbook
Pretty soon here I’m going to be leaving to visit my Grandpa in Florida for spring break. Luckly he lives in a condo and for the past couple of years there has been a nice person with an open but weak WiFi connection. So I decided to go on a quest for the Holy Grail a way to better my wireless reception. I had many options while on my quest for wireless reception perfection. Should I build a Cantenna or maybe a Omni antenna, but then my brother suggested that I take apart our old broken wireless router and snatch the wireless PC card from it. After some searching I found out that the card is a USR 2410. Sadly U.S. robitics doesn’t have a OS X driver but a company called IOxperts does. Unfortunately it costs $20 and the demo version that I have shuts down the driver after 30 minutes then I have to restart my computer to get it working again. But anyway having having the external antenna increases my wireless reception pretty substantially and I’m looking foward to good, strong WiFi reception.
Here are some pictures of me taking apart the antenna and turning my normal powerbook into a UberWiFi Powerbook
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4 Comments so far
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What about using kextload/kextunload and kextstat? So instead of rebooting just dynamically unload the the kernel extension and then reload it, maybe it will work, maybe it won’t?
If the Kextload and unload worked, you could even make a script (very small, like 3 lines) to unload and reload the kernel extention. Bad side is that if you where using the connection, about every thirdy minutes you would get disconnected. I personally think you should get new card that has WPA support. I can’t stand dealing with WEP. Put the $20 towards a Nice card, with open dirvers that can be used with Kismac and the OS itself.
I think when I get home I’ll try kextload/unload when I get home and see how that works. Then if it doesn’t maybe I’ll get a really cheap mac compatable card and take off the plastic cover thing over the antenna to see if I can plug the antenna in.