Combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Mini-PCI.

Hi, It does. Try searhing on eBay for a starter. Tony

This one?

says "Blue 802".

See:

of the reasons the 2002 version of Blue802 isn't all that popular is that Bluetooth 1.2 was released, which offers considerable immunity to 802.11b/g wireless by selecting a subset of frequencies (AFH) not used by the wi-fi card. This largely eliminated the need for a common card that did both. Also, the major target audience seems to be VoIP cell phones, not laptops.

There are also other (proprietary) solutions to coexistence such as Intel's WCS (wireless coexistence system).

My laptops have built in WiFi, and I just use the USB dongles for bluetooth.

Seems like a USB dongle would be a whole lot cheaper than a whole card, and how would you deal with an antenna?

ceed hath wroth:

Because there are many cases where you would want to run both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi at the same time. For example, a Bluetooth headset running Skype over a Wi-Fi to the internet. What's not obvious about the Blue802 and other methods is that there really are two radios on a single card. What Blue802 and others add is a method of synchronizing the frequency used by both the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi sections. This made lots of sense in the bad old days of Bluetooth

1.1, which hopped over the entired band. However, the FCC, in its infinite wisdome, conceeded that it might be a good thing to allow Bluetooth to selectively hop rather than trash the entire band. So, a rule change allowed AFH (adaptive frequency hopping) in Bluetooth 1.2, which largely eliminated the interference problem. If the Wi-Fi device uses Channel 1, the Bluetooth device will detect this and move to the other end of the 2.4GHz band. No synchronization required. So, in effect, Bluetooth 1.2 does 99% of what Blue802 was suppose to do. It's kinda hard to sell a product that nobody needs or that can be done cheaper with just protocol tweaking.

I expect the next generation of laptops to all have Bluetooth 1.2 or

2.0 built into the motherboard as a standard feature. The chip sets are cheap enough and the technology is finally stable enough to be considered almost "mature". That will allow the total elimination of the 3.5mm microphone and earphone jacks, to be replaced by an equivalent Bluetooth headset. Wireless will probably remain on a MiniPCI card.

Meanwhile, I suggest you live with the under $20 Bluetooth USB dongles, which work fairly well. I suggest you get one that does Bluetooth 2.0 as multimedia and stereo music via Bluetooth is sure to be a big thing. Avoid anything that reeks of Bluetooth 1.1.

Incidentally, I've been tinkering with quite a few assorted Bluetooth headsets and devices. In the past, I had severe mutual interference between Bluetooth 1.1 and Wi-Fi. With Bluetooth 1.2 and 2.0, I can still see some minor effects, but the garbage audio and loss of Wi-Fi thruput are mostly gone.

No results from Ebay except for the very useful device mentioned below.. :)

I still do not understand why there wouldn't be a market for a combined mini-pci card for laptops. I would purchase one immediately if it existed. Still can't find one though. Thanks you for the links though,

My Dell Latitude D610 has a separate (USB) Bluetooth module built in.

Since BT and WiFi use the same frequency band, you could concievably share the antennas, though you'd obviously need some well integrated card to do so, unless you cheated and used one antenna for BT and the other for WiFi, and neglected to tell your customers they were losing diversity...

I also use a dongle, but I travel a lot and it's unpractical having this thing sticking out (just like it was unpractical in the "old days" to have a PCMCIA wi-fi card sticking out).

Apple laptops have both built in. I know there are Dell's thart have both like yours. But mine doesn't, so I though that there would be combined mini-pci cards available. However, combo cards doesn't seem to be available for other laptops that MSI ones that can use the MSI combined card described here:

Since this USB combo exists, why not a Mini-PCI equivalent?

That's wierd that it would only work on two particular laptops, I'd think it was either Mini-PCI or it wasn't, but maybe the slot in those laptop isn't exactly Mini-PCI.

Sorry there aren't any good solutions...

Perhaps it is not cheap and easy to produce a mini pc card that will work on a wide range of laptops.As mentioned the MSI one only works on 2 models{according to the link you provided}. MSI also make a combo PCI card:-

that the BT connection is via a USB link and not through the PCI connections.It is possible they had to modify their notebook mobo's to provide a similar link so that the mini pci card works for these models and is therefore unsuitable for any others.If this is the situation then I wouldn't like to gamble on the mini pci standards being changed to accommodate this when BT is being built into a lot of the newer laptops as std.

Frank