OK, but it's range rather than bandwidth that was my real concern.
I'll admit that I've been lazy and haven't compared the FCC data for USB WiFi adapters yet. But I've seen that there are some designed for longer range, so I'm hopeful that there will be something equivalent to the transmission power of my existing router, if the Pi ZeroW's onboard WiFi doesn't prove powerful/reliable enough.
An impedance mismatch between the RF chip and the antenna can cause significant impact to the power dissipated by the chip. (And mismatches are pretty easy to get at 2.4GHz.)
Cutting pcb lines and soldering on your own component? That will be hard if not impossible to make work; the antenna is actually part of the pcb (it still has connecting lines, of course).
No, there's a resistor (probably 0ohm) that connects it and you can move it to instead connect with a footprint left for an antenna connector:
Well I was going to pull a WiFi antenna out of another old router. Are they all likely to be close enough, or should I look into the figures properly?
I've hapily connected any convenient WiFi antenna to PCI WiFi cards in the past without concern for impedance differences, and got away with it so far.
Oh, right! That's great.
On Sun, 21 Apr 2019 02:53:40 +0000 (UTC), snipped-for-privacy@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) declaimed the following:
60MBps is the maximum signal bit rate, yes... But that ignores overhead in USB control signaling (turn around between polling the bus to find devices with data to transfer, requesting the transfer, length of packet transferred -- shorter packets will involve more overhead -- ack/nak of packet, encode/decode time [checksum or CRC, and USB3 at least uses an encoding that takes 10bits per byte, to ensure state changes occur often enough to keep the sender/receiver in sync -- no runs of eight 0 bits, for example]...).The effective max is around 30MBps -- and that probably assumes a single client per host controller. With more than one device on the bus, the host will have to poll each device, then determine which gets to transfer data.
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