I've got several laptops with internal mini-PCI wifi cards (various brands).I'm wondering if anyone's made some sort of switcher that'd allow selectingbetween the internal antenna and on attached externally? I realize thiswould be a hack, to say the least, since the plastics on most laptops aren'tsetup to allow adding something like this. But given that the gauge of coaxused is so eff'ing tiny it's not something I'd want to cobble togethermyself.It'd be useful in situations where connectivity is found to be marginalusing the internal, so plugging in an external alternative might help. Butfor the vast majority of other situations it'd be burdensome to have to usethe external antenna all the time. Not to mention other things needing touse the PCMCIA slots.Anything like that out there?-Bill Kearney

I've got exactly that problem with my newish HP/Compaq v5000z. Theinternal radio is good enough for around the house and back yard, buton a recent car-camping trip across the southwest it had a hard timehitting far-off public hotspots from the picnic tables. Screwingaround with the sub-miniature u.fl connectors scares me. I just can'timagine they have that many plug/unplug cycles in them. (How the heckdo the assemply line folks plug those in, under a microscope???)My solution was to get a top-end cardbus card that takes an mmcxantenna. At least mmcx is meant to take a few plug/unplug cycles andI can do that without tweezers and microscope. True to my motto,"Anything worth doing is worth overdoing" I got a card that listed theRX sensitivity at -96dbm (Ubiquiti SRC). I'm not sure how much ofthat number is advertising hype and how much is fact, but the cardsure is sensitive. The card also advertises a higher powertransmitter, but one can of course turn down the tx power to...

laptop mini pci alternative antennae?

Jun 23, 2006 21 Replies

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SMS 20 years ago

Yeah, yeah, I meant powered versus non-powered.

I worked at a company that built Arcnet cards. Those were the days when we sold an ISA Arcnet card for $895! "

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John Navas 20 years ago

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:29:48 -0700, SMS wrote in :

Right.

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