Dual PCMCIA to PCI Adapter vs Single Orinoco Adapter

[Anonymous]

Hi to all.

I have found a strange behaviour using your dual PCMCIA to PCI Adapter, it seems that the same card outputs with 3-4 dbm less than the same card inserted in a single Orinoco Adapter.

May be that the dual adapter (charged only with 1 card) couldn't output the power needed by an high power card like the SENAO 23dbm ?

Any suggestion ?

Regards,
Christian

[georgew]

That is the same sort of problem I saw on the Soekris boards, the inward PC slot appears to provide more power to the radio card than the outboard slot did.

There is a good possibility that all of the high-power cards pull too much power. The senao cards appear to work better than the Zcomax cards in power-limited configurations.

[bobbyc]

For what it's worth, I have a dual RICOH slot card (purchased from valemount) that houses a unamped agere AP card and a unamped bromax prism 2.5 infrastructure card. The signal levels are the exact same as they were when the cards each had their own pci adapter.
What happened is that one of our CPUs with 6 pci slots had overheated. All I had for replacement is one of the 3 pci slot CPUs that Valemount sells... but I had 4 radios. So I had to use the dual adapter.
Now maybe if you use one of those high power cards they draw more mA than the medium power cards, and the PCI slot can't handle enough current for 2 cards.
The question then is this: Is it a limitation of the dual slot card, or the PCI slot of the motherboard?
Bob C

[lonnie]

The specs for PCI limit the current you can draw, so possibly a couple high power cards are too much. We know the dual PCMCIA works with two standard radios. We still do not have any of the high power cards since they are not Orinoco, and that is all I would want to use for an AP. I would never put 200 mW at a client, so that pretty much means we have no use for high power cards around here. Besides, with all the trouble I have seen you guys have with them, I would stay away anyway.

My feeling is there is inexpensive and there is cheap. The 200 mW card tries to duplicate a radio and amplifier, and that is an awful lot to expect.

[bobbyc]

Myself, and I think George, are having success with the senao 200mw prism 2.5 card as AP. The max clients I have on one is currently only 13 clients though, so I can't tell you if it is up to the task. I'll let you know down the road :)
Bob C

[georgew]

To me the most meaningful limitation of the prism cards is the 6-mile limit on performance.

I note people using amps have a lot of trouble with the amps... so it cuts both ways.

The 200mw senao cards perform well, and don't have the elevated noise floor you see with amps. But that doesn't really matter, you are limited to 6 mile links, so it doesn't matter if they are better or not. The orinoco cards are needed for long links, so if you have large cells they are pretty much mandatory.

[funkywizard]

for a card putting out 200mw, its really disappointing you can only go 6 miles. if you had a card like that at both ends, with sector at the base and a grid at the other end, should be able to go farther than that with 200mw if it weren't for the card's limitation. kinda makes the extra power seem unnessecary. Now the lucent cards on the other hand, they could definitely use with a little more power.

[georgew]

I agree... I think senao did a good job with their card... just too bad it is prism.

[dkii]

I have a prism 2.5 working in client mode at 7.7 miles with 500KBps rates.

[bobbyc]

So it's a prism 2.5 client with 500KB downloads from a hermes AP? What's the upload?
Bob C

[dkii]

Just tested, 495 rx and 408 tx, from the side with the prism. Card is a wmp11 Primary f/w 1.1.0 Sta: 1.7.4 according to dmesg log. AP is Lucent with RTS enabled and distance set to 12 miles. Link is 7.73 miles according to GPS. I also have a 16 mile link I'm gonna check also, but I'm not expecting much out of it.

[dkii]

Prism 2.5(Netgear) to lucent AP 16.40 miles AP distance set to 17 miles. Rx 175 tx 82 from prism side. Not great, but still not too bad. Same link with a lucent instead of prism 2.5: rx: 457 tx: 330

[bobbyc]

Very nice!
Bob C