Customer Reviews

EPI-3601S 802.11b/g Wireless PCI Card

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good quality product at a low price. I purchased one of these along with 25ft. of antenna cable and a flat panel antenna. I can see 22 access points using the Wireless Mon software operating on Windows XP. This card has an Atheros chipset and works with monitor mode and packet injection in Linux including Backtrack 3 & 4. GREAT VALUE!

I operate multiple wireless networks for both my employer's internal clients, as well as for public/guest access.

This is my goto card.

The folks raving about awesome range are not wrong, but there is a little more to the story...

Keep in mind that your wireless radio performs two functions: Sending and Receiving.

It's not enough to have high transmit power if the other side can't communicate back to your radio.

This also is not an appropriate card if your workstation isn't in a place where you already have line of sight.

It makes no sense to use a high power 600mw card, then attach it to cheap antenna cable that truncates the signal back down to 60mw.

Instead, get an external device that connects to the workstation via ethernet, like the bullet2hp, or a picostation.

There is no line loss in a normal run of cat5/6 and line loss in antenna cable, even expensive low loss cable - is significant.

Also, don't try to use this card in XP64 unless you are very familiar with alternate drivers and/or editing inf files.

I am impressed with the performance of this card. From a computer in a writer's shed that is about 150 feet behind our house, I can see no difference in the upload and download speeds that I get from my computer inside the house. Signal strength is good. In addition, I can see my neighbor's network which must be at least 800 feet away.

The installation is a little quirky and is reminiscent of circa Win 98. It took me a few tries to get it to install, and if I recall correctly, there is a contradiction in the instructions. Go with the first directive (which I think tells you to ignore Windows hardware setup). I am using this card with Win XP.

Once it is setup, this card rocks at a distance!

I originally bought this to increase the reception for my computer in the farthest room from the router. There would be times that web pages would not load at all for about 30 seconds. So I replaced the wireless card with this one, hoping to fix this issue. There are still times that I'll lose the ability to load a page, but they are much less often, and for much shorter periods of time. I have a very good router, and my laptop picks up in the room just fine.

If I could give 3.5 stars, I would, but since the product does work better than the one it replaced, I'm giving it 4 stars.

Note that a year later, it is a room closer to the router and never loses the ability to load a page.

Wonderful range on this card, even with the stick antenna it comes with. If you couple this card with a 15db antenna you will be amazed with the results.