# Good Wifi Card

## Sqeaky

I will soon be purchasing a wireless PCI card. Probably a B/G. What has worked well for you?

What have you used that has been manageable?

What about range?

What do you feel is a good wifi card now?

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## Qdot

 *Sqeaky wrote:*   

> I will soon be purchasing a wireless PCI card. Probably a B/G. What has worked well for you?
> 
> What have you used that has been manageable?
> 
> What about range?
> ...

 

I'll still stick to PRISM/Orinoco based ones.  These are .b ones, some may even not support WEP, but cuz it gives no real protection, it does not matter much.

However, they have been on the market long enough to be fully supported natively under Linux, with all sweet features like monitor mode, fast band sweep and AP mode.

Because of those wardriving features they are more likely to come with high quality receiver RF circuit, insane Tx power [like 0.2W or more @antenna connector] (needs unlocking and valid ham radio licence to legally operate in some countries), as those features are favoured by wardrivers (and appreciated by anyone wanting to have 11Mbps @2.3km line-of-sight distance between properly aligned antennae[still at free(non-ham allowed) transmit power, you should not use excessive power unless needed to sustain reliable transmission]). If playing with high quality digital radio is your goal, and you know your way around RF technology to make some use for it, I'd go for orinoco/PRISM.

#There is Prism Duette??? But I did not play much with it.. should support .g

Some other cards (still few) have vendor-provided native linux drivers, but they are not as feature-packed as PRISMs.

Other cards I used (BCM4306, than changed to Intel 2200) work with windows drivers, but because of limitations of win32's NDIS layer, they will not support any additional features (not even MAC address changing or AP mode), but are usable under Linux. I have them in laptop with some cleverly (read - bad emission performance) disguised antenna, so I could not judge for card's transmitter performance as I can't use any proper antennae.

### Disclaimer.. Some experts believe than living close to microwave equipment may be harmful to your health.. I don't think it will do under normal circumstances, but I wouldn't like to sleep with 0.25W 2.4GHz radio transmitter operating under my bed

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## Qdot

Hmm.. and one more thing.. take a good look at signal connectors.. There is quite a bunch of them (SMA, Rev-SMA, SRC, B+, Tri-(something) and few more you will not see in off-the-shelf hardware). Most equipment operate at 50Ohm impedance, so it's possible to adapt the connector if you have especially good antenna/card, but it's much easier just to buy things right.

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## Sqeaky

Thanks for the reply, 

I should Stick with Orinico and prism.

Is there any specific Model you would suggest?

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## Master Shake

I've had a d-link dwl-520 for 5 years now and it has served me well.  It is a wireless-b card.  I'd recommend getting that card if you don't mind if its b.  Also if you live in the US it'll cost you <$20.  I've never gotten a linksys to work, nor have it ever gotten a usb wireless to work with linux.  I also believe that belkins is another easy card to set up.

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## snakattak3

I just picked up an Airlink101 AWLH4030 wireless A/B/G from fry's for about $40. It uses the Atheros chipset, even says so right on the box. So the madwifi-driver in portage works great with it. As for the range, it seems fine. My router is downstairs through a couple walls, and i get good speeds up here. Its from a B router too, though I will be ugrading to a G router soon. The card supports WEP and WPA, and so far has given me no troubles.

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## xbmodder

I have a 1W amp about 5 feet away from where I sleep. Does it cause migraines?

Orinico rocks

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## Qdot

 *xbmodder wrote:*   

> I have a 1W amp about 5 feet away from where I sleep. Does it cause migraines?
> 
> Orinico rocks

 

Yea.. 1W @ 2.4GHz? Noone really performed reasonable studies of influence of long microwaves on human body - who knows...

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## lunarg

Linksys WPC54G v1.2 with ndiswrapper 1.1 works without a hitch.

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## Qdot

 *lunarg wrote:*   

> Linksys WPC54G v1.2 with ndiswrapper 1.1 works without a hitch.

 

With monitor/ap mode?

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## lunarg

If you mean signal strength monitoring, then yes.

But do mind that I only got it working correctly with wireless-tools (and not with wlan-ng).

And not sure if WPA works all that well (but I guess that has got something to do with the wrong parameters to iwconfig).

Also, do mind the v1.2, as some versions of that card are reported not to work very well:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/List

EDIT: haven't tested to run it in ap mode

EDIT2: I'm not sure whether ndiswrapper 1.1 runs on a 2.4 kernel; on 2.6 it's run perfectly.

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## kill

 *Qdot wrote:*   

> With monitor/ap mode?

 

Ndiswrapper does NOT support monitor mode.  Straight from the official ndiswrapper faq:

"Is Master mode supported?

No! NDIS doesn't support Master/Repeater/Monitor modes. The only modes supported are Ad-Hoc and Managed. Note that some drivers may support features that are not in NDIS (e.g., showing signal noise and possibly Master mode), but they are proprietary and no documentation available for them, so such features won't be supported by ndiswrapper."

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## Sqeaky

So I should stay away from linksys and get aetheros or dlink?

I have set up a few cards with the ndiswrapper, man it was a pain in the butt.

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## TerranAce007

I have an Intel Pro 2200BG chipset in my athlon64 laptop and it works great in native 64bit with the ipw2200 module and intel firmware. It was surprisingly easy to setup too, except for thw WEP encryption, but I got that working now too.

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## lunarg

 *kill wrote:*   

>  *Qdot wrote:*   With monitor/ap mode? 
> 
> Ndiswrapper does NOT support monitor mode.  Straight from the official ndiswrapper faq:
> 
> 

 

Like I said:

 *lunarg wrote:*   

> If you mean signal strength monitoring, then yes.

 

So guess it's a miss-communication...

 *Sqeaky wrote:*   

> So I should stay away from linksys and get aetheros or dlink?

 

If you want native linux support, then I suggest to go with atheros or intel-based chipsets.

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## lbrtuk

In general, you shouldn't plan to get a card that will only work with ndiswrapper.

It is a hack and should only be used as a last resort.

If you use native drivers you

 Support companies that release specs for their cards

 Get extra features

 Can run on non x86 platforms

 Can debug kernel if something goes wrong

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## Smoothhound

 *lbrtuk wrote:*   

> In general, you shouldn't plan to get a card that will only work with ndiswrapper.
> 
> It is a hack and should only be used as a last resort.
> 
> If you use native drivers you
> ...

 

I couldn't agree more!  :Smile: 

The axc100 driver seems to be getting better by the day - it now supports WEP for acx111 based cards. It works very well for my Netgear WG311 v2.

It's ~x86 masked in portage.

HTH

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## lunarg

Exactly so.

I can only hope that one day, Broadcom will go overboard and create some decent native drivers for linux (opensource or not). Until then, I'm sticking with ndiswrapper. Better to emulate than no wireless, I guess.

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