[Glastonbury] wireless PCMCIA card

[Kelvin McNulty]

On Wednesday 17 November 2004 12:56, Alistair Parsons wrote:
> Has anyone used a wireless PCMCIA card with any success and could
> recommend it?

Yes. I use a Buffalo Air Station WLI-PCM-L11GP card. I bought two of them 
after I went to the Home Educators Seaside Festival (HESFES) at Charmouth in 
May 2003 and some guys from a company called Psand were there running a 
wireless network with satellite uplink to the Internet. I took my laptop, 
with SuSE 8.1 on it, over to them, and they installed one of these cards and 
had it working on their network with nothing more than a bit of configuring 
(they knew what they were doing, I have since figured it out for myself how 
to configure). The software that I already had on the computer appeared to 
include all that is necessary to handle the card, which is compatible with 
Orinoco cards, apparently (I say that because before spending GBP you need to 
satisfy yourself about it).

The card is rated at 11Mbps which has always felt plenty fast enough. It was 
delightful to sit in the HESFES field with my laptop and log on to the Web at 
broadband speeds, and it was wonderful just how easy it was to set up, and 
has worked trouble free ever since. I'm using it right now to send this 
message.

A really good feature of these cards is that they have a jack (MC Card jack) 
which you can use to connect an external aerial. I have a patch antenna which 
gives a gain of 8db, more than doubling the range over which one can use the 
wireless connection.

So I recommend this type of card, it will definitely work with SuSE 8.1, and 
probably with other distributions, as long as they have the handler for 
Orinoco cards, as far as I can tell.

The PCMCIA socket was already part of the laptop (as usual) and was already 
recognised by the software.

Hope this helps,

Kelvin