> > Has anyone put an external antenna on a powerbook G4 before? I have a friend who is > trying to gain access to my AP but he is right on the fringe of reception and I > would like to help him without destroying his powerbook in the process. > --
Apple has the tendency to install a very unique antenna system inside their products. They start with a orinoco card - which has a secret little feature for apple. From the hidden jack on it, they leave on a single piece of coax to a small (1cm x 2cm) pcb - on this they have a diversity switch constructed to watch for bias voltage on the coax from the card. From there - they leave with two coax-es - usually to opposite parts of the product - at the end of each of these coaxes is the standard folded dipole that everyone uses. It gives apple a diversity antenna with a single coax feed -- novel! I have several friends with powerbooks who come into my lab and find that their signal levels are weaker than my PC with an orinoco card (to make it fair and ballanced) and just the pcmcia fob antenna. They always seem to blame the metal case on the laptop as being too good of a faraday cage for an internal 2.4G system. One person worked at apple and got me a handful of these diversity antennas - I taped one to the back of my PC's display so it had 2 antennas sticking up, then routed the wires back and plugged into my orinoco card's jack - It had GREAT coverage with the antennas external and high up on the display! It even outperformed my newly acquired cisco 350 pcmcia card at the time! I suspect the Industrial Designers and RF engineers battled it out over an external antenna - and the RF engineers lost - the powerbooks ID won out and it is a very attractive computer as a result. Imagine what it would look like with two little spikes above the display! I'm sure apple rejected that idea because of the potential names like "el diablo", etc. You can order that external antenna assembly from apple as a spare part (my friend just grabbed a handful off the production line) - he can pop out his keyboard from the powerbook, exposing the orinoco card underneath. Unplug the built-in cable, and install your purchased 2nd version - then route it out from under the keyboard and up - use some kapton tape to hold it in place. it won't look pretty - but you'll probably get 6-10 dB of gain over the basic powerbook (seriously!) by getting the antennas outside the box. Everett > > Brian Lloyd 6501 Red Hook Plaza, Suite 201 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] St. Thomas, VI 00802 > +1.340.998.9447 - voice +1.360.838.9669 - fax > GMT-4 > > -- > general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> > [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
