Short answer : yes
Long answer :
Apple's 'Airport' technology is based majoritivly on lucent's wavelan turbo,
aka orinoco aka agere, oh wait, they're proxim now aren't they... anyway the airport
card is literally an orinoco silver minus the pcmcia chipset (i.e. just a radio and
MAC) and lo-and-behold it also has that proprietary little lucent connector on the end
which is what apple has providied by means of it's internal antenna.
I call the card a silver because silver and golds are the same card, the
silver uses a single chip inside to only do 64bit WEP while the golds use both chips
inside for full 128bit WEP. Apple's cards were originnally using the single
encryption chip for 64bit support (because the 1st gen graphite basestation have a
full lucent silver inside) and then version 2.02 had a firmware update than enabled
both chips and full 128bit support.
Enought about that, so basicly apple has provided an internal antenna in
desktop/imacs/ibooks/powerbooks for quite some time now, and the range using that
built in antenna has been great to poop depending on who you ask and their particular
setup. on the whole powerbooks have farred worse than ibooks, both any/all models can
be extended to lucent's desktop antenna or another solution providing you locate the
proper cable to go from the lucent connector on the airport card to your antenna).
I thought about doing this for my recently purchases ibook, routing a cable
inside of it to it's side port panels and some sort of easier to manage connector
(RCA/BNC) but having to couple an antenna through an adaptor induced enough of a
signal loss that unless you go directly from airport card -> antenna you can end up
weakening your reception, and spending money at the same time which is why I never did
it)
A powerbook though has the option for an normal pcmcia wireless card. I've
used orinoco silver/golds under 9.x as native airport cards with much success and also
under OSX using the open source 802.11b card driver
(http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net/) which supports an even wider range of cards
since apple dropped airport support for pcmcia orinoco cards in OS X.
What I'm getting at is that you'd probably want a pcmcia card, since it is a
powerbook and has pcmcia slots (ibooks lack them and irda) and then use an external
antenna on that to boost reception/range.
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 01:49:09AM -0400, Larry Velez wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Are there any solutions for installing an external antenna to a
> Powerbook's built in Wifi card?
>
> A friend asked me about this and I could not find any info on it. It
> seems the powerbook card has a built in antenna behind the screen.
>
> Has anyone heard of somebody taping into this antenna to connect an
> external antenna for more range?
>
> Thanx,
>
> Larry
>
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