It all started as a hack...
Back in 1999, when the AirPort Base Station marked Apple's grand venture into WLAN territory, there was a small company in the backwoods of beautiful Thuringia whose owner lived across the road, just out of reach of the company's AirPort Base Station.
The base station was quickly disassembled, a suitable antenna found, and the whole thing installed in the dusty attic, from where more than 50 m could now be bridged to the other building uphill.
Today, with the warranty on the old AirPort Base Station long gone, all you need is some talent for a little mecanical modification or disregard for an ugly solution if you prefer not to do the mecanical bit.
Increasing the range of the AirPort Base Station - proceed at your own risk!
Range and transmission speed of the AirPort Technology (basically the IEEE 802.11b standard) are strongly dependant on the signal strength.
Lucent, Apple's partner for the original base station, offers an indoor antenna that promises 10-30% according to their data sheet - the antenna is available through your favorite reseller who can easily purchase this from Dr. Bott KG.
The original AirPort base station was not built to be modified or extended in any way.
You will need a Phillips screwdriver and 15 min. and the RangeExtender to duplicate our results.
Note that you are voiding any warranty that may exist for your base station. However, if you are careful, the worst you can break is the fragile connector on the antenna itself (no warranty if this happens!).
Start by loosening the 3 screws that hold top and bottom shell of the base station together (no picture).
Inside you see this:
The 4 marked screws are removed, you now can pick up the inside of the unit a little bit (1-2 cm is enough - don't force anything!).
The yellow arrow on the right marks the AirPort card that is part of the base station - it is a standard Lucent Orinoco Silver card with an internal antenna and, important for us, a port for connecting an external antenna!
Simply remove the little round piece of black plastic that covers this antenna port and plug in your RangeExtender (left yellow arrow).
If you want to avoid any mechanical modification of the AirPort Base Station you put everything back together, leaving enough room for the antenna cable to stick out of the side of the base station:
The mechanically inclined can improve this rough construction by drilling a little hole in the outer case of the base station and adding some sort of strain relief for the cable - below is a pictorial of what we did:
Either way the external antenna has regulatory approval around the world - the same combination of Orinoco Silver card and external antenna was a frequent solution to improve wireless connectivity for notebooks.
We immediately got the desired 50+ m range from the above modification in the attic location with mainly wooden walls and thin single-pane windows.
In a different setup with vacuum-isolated double-paned windows things were more difficult and we resorted to putting the antenna outside on the window sill, while keeping the base station indoors. Please note that the RangeExtender is NOT designed to be used outdoors, even if we did get several years of reliable service in a protected spot.
This page mainly documents our private hack for increasing the usefulness of ageing AirPort Base Stations. For further information on how to maintain this pioneer device we recommend Constantin von Wentzel's excellent "Sharing Apple Base Station Experiences".
Reseller Inquiries welcome!
|
