I bought a new wireless card for my 15″ Aluminum Powerbook on Friday. I’ve been using it non-stop in place of the Airport eXtreme card that is built in. People wonder why I’d desire a second wireless card for my laptop, which is an understandable question. To put your mind at ease, here are some reasons:

• I desired a different wireless card, not another wireless card
• Airport eXtreme uses a very closed, very secretive Broadcom chipset, rumored to be used by Department of the Air Force.
• The AX card until just recently did not support AES encryption, which to me is the whole reason to use WPA.
• Open source tools and operating systems could not use the Airport Extreme card natively.

By sticking to the Airport extreme, it basically limited me to using Mac OS X and commercial software for wireless access. I do like to wardrive from time to time, and Airport Extreme doesn’t have the ability to enter ‘promiscous mode’. If you don’t know why that is important, you probably don’t care much about the technical aspects of this review. I’ve been a user of Linux as my primary computing environment since late 2000 and I’ve fallen victim to the pleasures of wireless technology.

I ended up purchasing the Hawking Technology HWC54D PC Card. I was at CompUSA and was perusing through all of the WiFi products. What I was realy looking for was a card with an external antenna jack. I noticed the HWC54D because it included a “High-Gain directional Antenna”. This was certainly unique. I then grabbed the box and walked over to the Apple section to run the card through Google to see what its innards were made of. I wanted to know if I could use it under Linux and KisMAC. As it turns out, this card uses the RaLink rt2500 chipset. Which is great news because RaLink is very open about their hardware specs. They released their rt2400 driver source code to an open source group to maintain and contribute. They later released the rt2500 chipset specs and code to the same group. I then checked the Kismet website to see if they supported it. Kismet does, however KisMAC doesn’t yet. I hope they add support soon. :-/

Anyway, so I bought it, noting that I could return it to CompUSA within 21 days (I think) with a receipt and get a full refund. Good enough for me. I brought it home and plugged it in. I was booted into Tiger (10.4.2) first. The card does come with a CD for installation, however the CD only contains Windows drivers. I noted earlier that in various forums many people needed drivers because they lost their CD or bought the card on eBay or something. (Anyone can have mine if you send me a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope). I jumped over to RaLink website where I downloaded the OS X Tiger driver and utility. Installed without any problems and connect to my WPA-PSK/TKIP network immediately. Although the data rate was only 48Mbps even though I was in the same room as the AP. Whatever. I decided to do some performance testing. I took my Powerbook outside using the Airport Extreme card and pinging the AP until I reached the limit of connectivity. The Airport monitor in the toolbar isn’t very accurate for signal strength, so I used KisMAC to check actual signal strength. I then walked away until KisMAC couldn’t receive any signal at all from my AP. I closed then activated my new “High-Gain” card. I had pretty good signal. I was now at 24 Mbps, which isn’t bad at all. The utility also claimed ‘Excellent’ signal quality, which indicates little interference. I continued to walk until I started to see packet loss. I was able to move about 30 meters from the AP. That’s 30 Meters in the direction of most obstacles. The AP was on the far side of the house, so I was pretty impressed with the range.

The next day I tested the power consumption rate of the card. Typically with my Airport Express on and using my laptop, I could have about 1 - 1.5 hrs of battery life. I could stretch 2 hrs if I turned the brightness all the way down, muted the speakers, and didn’t use much processor. I’m happy to report to you that my laptop ran for about 2.5 hrs with a constant ping to the AP and playing MP3’s from my iTunes collection. So the power consumption is noteably lower than the Airport Extreme. This is to be expected of course, because the HWC54D is a PC Card, which uses a 3.3V or 5V power supply, which is less than the miniPCI card (I think). Also note, that I did in fact enable the Power Save mode in the card utility. I did this since many people noted the card draining their battery. Maybe that has to do with the 48Mbps limit I noted earlier.

I visited my friend Julian in his new apartment for a barbeque on Sunday. He lives in a cluster of apartments and has the intersection of about 6 or 7 AP’s in his apt. There was one named ‘linksys’ that I thought I’d try to connect to. I was able to connect with a decent signal. I could browse the Interweb at pretty good speeds. The problem I had though, was that I kept getting kicked off the network. I blame it on somebody with a 2Wire DSL modem who is operating on channel 6, the same channel as ‘linksys’. The 2Wire network had a stronger signal and I believe was causing too much interference. Since they didn’t bother to change the SSID, I assume they probably aren’t using the wireless anyway.

All in all, I’m happy with the performance of the card. It worked with the same results under Kubuntu Linux, but I did have to compile the driver and utility from source. This didn’t bother me at all, as I am a *NIX geek. Hopefully somebody will find this review useful. If you have similar results, or problems that I didn’t encounter, please leave a comment and share with the community.