Lots of people mention this card in passing, some with some positive commentary, but no one seemed to go into any depth on it. Since I broke down and bought one, I guess I'll do it -- even though I do live in the 'wrong' bay area. :-)
First impressions. It's awfully cheap looking. :-) The antenna jacks and the locator pin sockets for the removable double-RP-MMCX patch antenna are set in a casting on the card, but the entire patch housing is plastic -- *including* the locator pins themselves. Given that they were bright enough to stagger the pins so you can't plug it in upside down, the fact that they couldn't be bothered to make at least the pins a) metal and b) longer (they're about 2.5mm long) is a bit of a pain. But for $51 (www.pagecomputers.com, thanks to the BAWUGer who found them for me -- off list, so I'm not mentioning him here), I guess I can't complain too much. My primary goal was Kismet, so it was to #kismet I turned when I couldn't find *anything* useful on the web as to how to get the PCMCIA cardmgr to recognize the card. Dragorn kindly pointed me to wlan-ng; I found a set of RPM's for it at http://prism2.unixguru.raleigh.nc.us/ courtesy of Tim Miller. Warning: those RPM's will dump your card manager when you run them; make sure you get everything (and get off IRC :-) before you install. Took one extra power cycle to get everything cleared up in the PCMCIA controller, and then cardmgr recognized the card... as a "DemarcTech Relia-Wave 180mW 802.11b WLAN Card". <snicker> That may be just because that's what the package maintainer (or his submitter) had, but I guess there's *some*`commonality there, huh? In any event, it came up and with no configuration at all, locked on to my sister's Linksys BEFSW11-4; grabbed a DHCP address, and went to town. So I tried to grab Kismet. Kismet's singularly difficult to find in binary form, for a bunch of reasons, apparently. Yeah, yeah, I know: "appliance operator"; was a 2-meter ham; heard it all before. My Laptop Is A Pentium 266. 3 hours to compile. Need any more on that? :-) I did actually get it to build (once I moved it to the drive that *had* enough space -- Kismet takes, like, 50MB to compile, atop unpacking it), and except for a couple "diseased buffer" crashes, it seems to b e working fine -- 48 networks between me and my first client today -- only 6 of them WEPped... including my own office's network, thankfully. Given the fragility of the RP-MMCX's, I think I'm just going to buy a second card to go in my car with my spare laptop and a magmount. When the card costs less than the antenna and pigtail, your priorities change... :-) Oh, the manual is *miserable*. Typical consumer crapola. Nice enough card, though. Thanks to those who helped me on my quest. Cheers, -- jr 'Existential Blues go here' a -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
