Customer Reviews

Netgear WAG311 Dual Band Wireless PCI Adapter

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

 

 

It's difficult, if not impossible, these days to find a pci based wireless card that handles all three bandwidths a/b/g with adequate power and an external antenna connector so you can extend the range of your card significantly. The FCC has a mess of regulations regarding the 5 gig band and the addition of transmit and receive sensitivity, whether by adding your own external attenna or raw power output of the card, is strictly regulated. On the surface it might look like this card falls lock step to the FCC code as it comes with a netgear shield over it and a seemingly fixed wire that runs out to the end of a 2.5 inch fixed dipole.

But on closer inspection you only need to pop off the shield with some needlenose pliers (taking into account the voidance of the warranty of course) to discover the hidden mcx connector that you can detach the stock antenna and add your own mcx pigtail of your choice. There's even a nice little solder block to allow you to solder your own pigtail onto and opening for the connector on the card. The b/g radio can crank to 98mW and 11a up to 50mW of power. There are only a handful of PCI tri mode cards, and this is one of the only that have the power requirements and external antenna requirement I wanted without having to soder my own straight onto the pcb.

I would not recommend this pci based product. It is very problematic to get working at all. It seems to have difficulty with IRQ or other conflicts that other similar cards can resolve without difficulty. On no less than 3 Windows 2k machines with latest sp's I ended up pulling all cards out except the video card to even get the computer to boot with the netgear card installed. I purchased this to support airopeek traffic sniffer from Wildpackets for my job. After several hours of difficult troubleshooting I shipped the netgear product back and instead purchased one of the highly recommended Cisco dual band cards.

I highly recommend using this product with a NetGear Access Point or NetGear firewall combo-device like the FWAG114. The only caveat is the signal was sometimes surprisingly low in a small area, but as it constantly polls different frequencies, it improves over time.