Recently a friend brought over a TiBook (PowerBook G4 400). After playing with it for a while I noticed how limited the range was on the built in Airport card. The well reported limitation was actually worse than most of the published reports. After checking to make sure the AirPort card and antenna was plugged in properly it became apparent that the infamous limitation was indeed a design flaw and not a a hardware issue.
Not being one to leave well enough alone, I began a journey to resolve this limitation. After some research into the Airport card it became apparent that the drivers for it were loosely similar to the open source Broadcomm equivalent. Loosely similar might not be that accurate but it got me where I needed to be. A few years ago I ran to a problem trying to find a RedHat driver for my a Linksys WPC54G. Although Linksys didn't make a linux driver at the time, the solution was to modify a Broadcomm driver to fit the Linksys WPC54G card. Could that mod also work for Mac OS X Tiger?
To test the theory I inserted the Linksys card into the TiBook pcmcia slot and began to search for the files I needed to modify. Before I could launch Spotlight I realized that the Signal Strength meter was on full. After checking the Preferences it became apparent that the Linksys WPC54G card was supported by OS X natively. Tiger had disabled the internal Airport, enabled the Linksys WPC54G, copied the WEP key over to the new "Airport Port" and connected to the default SSID. Who could have known. NO MODIFICATION NEEDED! This BLOG is minutes from when the card was enabled but this seems REALLY strange. Who would have guessed that OS X Tiger had support for Linksys PCMCIA NIC adapters. Please post if you find out others that work as well. Either way I would think this is a boon for Apple. Linksys (now owned by Cisco) is a huge player in the NIC market. Gotta hope that the Intel switch won't effect the nougaty center of OS X by removing support for things like this.
Disclaimer.
I can only tell you that it worked for me. I've not tested it on other machines and I've not tested it with other cards. If you decide to try this you do so at your own risk. All readers of this blog must hold all parties harmless for it's content.
