On Apr 13, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Bruce - in Orlando wrote:
Can anyone tell me what the real problem is?
It appears the aluminum PowerBook suffers like the Ti PowerBook did,
bad reception because of metal case (Faraday cage). A few people
bought external antennas from QuickerTek, but they don't seem to make
these any more, and they were very expensive. You can build a homemade
Pringle's can external antenna but this will make your PowerBook look
like some sort of weapon and you'll probably get arrested if you use
it in public, see:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448>
A USB 802.11n WIFI adapter might be the optimal choice. Get any model
using a Broadcom chipset and it will be recognized as Apple Airport as
long as the correct VID & PID are listed in the info.plist of the
Broadcom plugin (AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext) of the IO80211Family.kext.
There's a script available to add all known combinations of VID & PID
so that everything works, it's called "bcm43xx_enabler.sh". A cheap
USB 802.11n adapter would be both an upgrade and hopefully fix the
reception issue, and as long as it's Broadcom chipset it will
integrate perfectly as if it was regular Apple Airport (remove your
OEM Airport card first, and delete "Airport" from System
Preferences>Network prior to adding the USB adapter. Then reboot with
the USB adapter, go to Network and it should auto-detect the "new"
Airport hardware and you should be in business.
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