September 2003
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
8h 39m
English
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Adding an Antenna to the AirPort
Significantly extend your range when using an AirPort base station.
As stated many times in this book, the single most effective method for extending range is to use a good antenna. Most access points ship with a simple dipole or small omni that doesn’t offer much gain, but at least gets the antenna away from the body of the access point. The Apple AirPort is a somewhat expensive AP that includes an integrated antenna but no external antenna connector. This state of affairs has been corrected on their newest AirPort Extreme models, which include an external antenna connector, but there are a huge number of older AirPorts deployed that rely on the internal antenna for communications.
Luckily, the radio inside the Graphite AirPort is a Lucent/Orinoco/Avaya Silver card, which includes an antenna connector of its own. With a little bit of work, it is possible add your own external antenna. All you need is a screwdriver, a dremel tool, a Lucent pigtail [Hack #66], and about half an hour.
As you can see in Figure 4-5, the only ports on the back of a Graphite AirPort are the modem, power, and Ethernet. The rest of the AirPort is sealed, and there isn’t room to squeeze a pigtail in without cutting a hole in the chassis. I found that I used the modem only once since I bought the AirPort, so rather than cut a hole in the side of the AirPort, I could just remove the telephone jack and feed the pigtail through the little square.
Figure 4-5. The business end ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.