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Airport Extreme Wireless Power

    The wires are cut! Well, at least for my iBook. BestBuy has a sale this week on the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station so I picked one up. I’ve been wanting one for a couple months now but the price was just a little too much to justify it.

    Anyhoo, spent the last hour or so trying to figure out why my receive power level was so frickin’ low on the iBook. I had been very surprised in the past at how few wireless access points were in this area (a bunch of big apartment buildings with a fair number of college aged kids). Anyhoo, I got to thinking about what could be the problem. Figured I should open up the iBook and check the simple stuff like if the antenna was connected, etc.

    I pushed hard on the antenna connector to try and see if it would go in any further to the card. Not even a budge. I looked a little closer and found it odd that it seemed to be sticking out a lot. OK, one last try. Pushed even harder and presto it popped in all the way. OOOoooo. I wonder.

    iBook AirPort menu with 5 other access points visible
    iBook AirPort menu with 5 other access points visible

    Fired up the beast and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am I’m now seeing a full receive power on the iBook. Out of curiosity I hit the airport status drop down on my menu bar and this is what I now see:

    Yup, 5 other networks.

    Next I started up iStumbler and discovered that there are actually 11 or 12 access points I can see right from my comfy couch, half of which are wide open. Crazy.

    Too bad I hadn’t noticed my not quite seated antenna before or I could have been, uh, borrowing access from someone else. Oh well. Now it should work better in the frickin’ airport while waiting for my flights in May. Sometimes I’m a dumbass. Maybe I should file this one under Stupid too!

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