Your Guide To Wireless

Small Atheros Wi-Fi Wireless Chips

Atheros Shrinks Wi-Fi Wireless Networking Chips So They Can Fit In The Tiniest Applications Atheros Communications said in the fall that its tiny Wi-Fi chips would be used in a range of exciting new applications. It revealed at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January that its chips are used in the award-winning Eye-Fi SD memory cards. The cards have a built-in wireless networking antenna that lets them automatically upload digital camera images to networked computers or even In...

Canary Wireless Sings A New Wi-Fi Tune

Another CES has come and gone, giving us more new-product announcements than an army of tech journalists could give their proper due. As usual, the big players grabbed the lion's share of the pub, while smaller companies garnered less, including Canary Wireless and its second-gen Digital Hotspotter HS-20, a Wi-Fi detector/analyzer with a scrollable, backlit LCD (96 x 64) displaying network ID, encryption status, signal strength, and other details of 802.11b/g/n networks. The 2-ounce HS-20 run...

Transfer pictures from Cam to PC, Without Wires

Imagine this: You come home from a day of shooting photos, and while you veg out, your images are automatically transferred from your camera to your favorite photo-sharing site. This is what the $99 Eye-Fi Card does: All you need is a Wi-Fi connection, a camera that accepts SD cards, and a PC or Mac, it's really that simple. The 2GB Eye-Fi Card looks like your basic SD card on the outside, but Wi-Fi technology is hidden inside. To get started, you have to install the web based Eye-Fi Man...

Municipal Wireless on the Ropes

If you visit Chicago and you want public Wi-Fi access, you'd better go to Starbucks. Once hailed as one of the pioneers of the citywide municipal Wi-Fi movement, Chicago reevaluated its original $18.5 million plan, citing market conditions, and will redeploy the project in the next year or two. On the heels of Chicago's announcement, Philadelphia and New York have also reported problems getting their Wi-Fi programs off the ground. In fact, MuniWireless.com has downgraded its growth estimates for...

Novatel Merlin V620 Wireless PC Card Modem

If you're lucky enough to live within Verizon’s highspeed Evolution Data Only (EVDO) network, the Merlin V620 Wireless PC Card Modem from Novatel will supply broadband like Internet access. The V620 card itself costs only a little more than a standard Wi-Fi adapter. Service, however, is quite high per month for unlimited access.There’s also a limited plan that supplies access based on data usage at 20MB for lower cost per month. To install, just loaded the CD, ran the install software, and popped the card into our notebook's PC Card slot. The tests in New York showed the V620 to be the fastest and most consistent cellular PC Card. Inside Grand Central Terminal, speed recorded a bandwidth of 1.4Mbps. On a moving train, the bandwidth dropped to a healthy 823Kbps.

Wireless Bridge

With the proliferation of both citywide and neighborhood spanning networks, finding WiFi service is becoming less of a problem. But it can be tough to get a consistently strong signal. One way to improve reception is to point a bigger directional antenna toward the strongest local network signal. HyperLink Technologies and MacWireless, among others, sell such antennas. Another approach, especially if you're hoping to bring the outside network into your home or office and then share it over...

How To Improving WiFi Network Range

This is continue of yesterday post. Upgrade your base station Routers that are based on the Draft N specification incorporate MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antenna arrays. MIMO can improve range as well as speed. The Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO Router released in 2007 use Draft N, and Belkin claims that the standard has twice the range of its predecessor. In the tests, range has improved a lots as other brand, such as Linksys and several other companies sell Draft N routers. Because those routers improve both transmission power and reception sensitivity, you can update just the gateway and continue using the older adapters on all your computers; the range of your network should still improve. Add an antenna You could also install a large, strong antenna on your base station so that it could blast out more-powerful signals. Many WiFi gateways have antennas that you can unscrew and replace with another antenna that produces a stronger signal. HyperLink Technologies has been selling antennas, and providing compatibility information about which gateways and wireless cards they work with, for years. The information is a bit technical, but it’s an exhaustive resource. Apple has always kept its antennas inside the housing of its AirPort Base Stations; just a few of the 802.11g AirPort Extreme Base Stations came with an antenna jack for adding an external one. MacWireless has antennas, tools, and instructions for adding antennas to all AirPort models. MacWireless also offers a High Power 11g Access Point at $180. This unit has a regular-size antenna but a much more powerful radio, which provides more than 10 times the raw output power of most consumer gateways. There is one downside to upgrading your antenna: while it can help your network, it can also mess up others. That’s because nearby networks may pick up your signals, and their performance will degrade as they try to cope with the barrage. Upgrade your radio If you have an older wireless network adapter without 802.11n built in, you can improve its range by attaching an 802.11n adaptor. QuickerTek nNano USB adaptor, for example, works with any Mac running Mac OS X 10.3 or later. The company also has a CardBus card and PCI Card that work with PowerPC models running Mac OS 10.3.9 or higher, and upgrade kits for Intel Macs starting at $100. All of these adapters have one important limitation: they operate only in the crowded 2.4GHz band. But they can still improve range by transmitting farther and listening more carefully. Add more base stations Another way to extend network range is to build a network with many base stations, all with the same network name. WiFi adapters look for a network name, not a specific gateway. If one base station doesn’t cover your home or office, perhaps two or five or 10 might. You could deploy a bunch of network base stations or AP, but that’d get expensive. Other 802.11g and 802.11n WiFi gateways start from around £20. In a standard network of multiple base stations, you configure one base station as the gateway, plugged into a broadband router. You connect additional base stations through Ethernet, or wirelessly through WDS (Wireless Distribution System), which is built into the base station and other gateways. To make the multiple-base stations setup work, you need to configure the main base station as a gateway to your broadband connection. You then configure the other base stations to pass traffic in bridge mode; that way, they leave the responsibility for assigning IP addresses to the primary base station. To set this up with the AirPort Extreme, go to AirPort Utility’s Internet pane, select the Internet Connection tab, and select Off (Bridge) from the Connection Sharing menu. Plug the WAN (Wide Area Network) port from these subsidiary base stations into a LAN (Local Area Network) port on the primary base station, or into an Ethernet switch that’s plugged into the LAN port. For other base stations, you’ll have to check the manual. As an alternative, you could use home power-line networking to connect base stations. Many power-line vendors offer combos consisting of a wireless access point with a built-in power-line adaptor; that way, you can extend your network without using WDS or Ethernet.