I now have two Ubiquiti 802.11 a/b/g cards in my grubby little hands.
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They do seem more sensitive than the laptops built-in Broadcom 4319 unit. (Broadcom Corporation Dell Wireless 1470 DualBand WLAN rev-02 to be exact.) While the broadcom sees 3 other systems, the Ubiquiti sees 8. Unfortunately the Broadcom doesn't give me valid signal strength and noise numbers so I can't easily tell how many much more sensitive the card is.
Now the question is how best to get one of these Ubiquiti cards used at the access point end of things. I was wondering if I could stick one of their cards in a spare computer and use that for the access point. Ubiquiti has a mini-pci and an cardbus version with roughly similar specs. The problem seems to be that mini-pci is "3.3 volts" and normal PCI is "5 volts". I assume the issue is both the power supply voltage and the signaling voltage on the bus. Did anyone here ever try to stick a mini-pci wireless card into their pci via an adaptor? Here is one that google found for me:
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The part that is ominous is: "Not recommended for old system boards or for use together with 5V PCI cards." That seems to be saying one can't put this into any computer that has other cards in the pci slots.
Would a generic pci-cardbus adaptor be safer? Any recommendations?
-wolfgang