CZroe
Lifer
My two new Belkin PCMCIA 802.11b cards are having SERIOUS trouble, but because those and the PCI adapters for them are all I have it is tough to figure out why. I "bridged" the PCI adapter with my cable modem's NIC in XP to share the Internet connection and it worked (My cable co allows multiple IPs even through a simple hub). But it only works well for a minute tops. After that pings to websites jump from 40-80ms to 23000 to 33000ms! Things time out, I can't get the cards to reconnect or the IP addresses to renew or anything. As far as diagnosing goes, I can't do much. First of all, there is no connection quality info in ADHOC mode (One-to-one connection without an access point). I tried having the cards right next to each other but that doesn't help anything. I assumed that one may have a faulty antenna, but I have no other card to swap with. The antennas are built-in and not expandable. My laptop gets the card hotter than any heatsink I've touched in years, so I tried it desktop-to-desktop with two PCI adapters but that didn't solve the problem (Perhaps the heat permanantly damaged it?). I tried sharing the Internet connection through my other desktop and the problem persisted. All the while, the Internet connection remained flawless on all the directly connected PCs. Without an access point to examine connection data or additional hardware I seem to be stuck. I live in a small town and I honestly don't expect the Starbuck's that's 45 miles away to have 802.11b access (Not all do, so it's a prime candidate for passing it up), so I didn't expect to find any access points around town to try it with (Especially without a directional antenna), but I did. It was too weak to stay connected to for long enough to even see if it had an Internet connection shared, so it's either too far away or the card IS weak (Broken internal antenna?). I'm going to try the same area tomorrow with the other card and see what I can get. Any other suggestions?
