Inside an Airport

[eric2006]

I was helping someone fix their Airport, which was no longer connecting to the internet. 10 hours and one Genius later, it was decided that it was broken. So, I helped them setup a new Linksys router, and they gave me the broken Airport, and an old Graphite one. There's not a whole lot you can do with a broken Airport, so I decided to open it up and see if there was something I could fix. The wireless part of it was working just fine. It's interesting to see what's inside, among other things, an Airport card that should work in non-extreme Macs.







What to do with a broken Airport? What else?



Unfortunately, I was unable to fix it, probably a burnt out transistor..

[eric2006]

As I said, the Airport was working wirelessly, just not connecting through one port. Do you think that the Airport card will work in the Macs that support pre-extreme cards? It looks like a normal Airport card.. I might get an old G4 and resell it with Airport.

[taylorlightfoot]

tell us if the card works in pre extreme macs

[Trip]

Sell it on eBay with small print at the bottom explaining: "Product for display purposes only. Does not actually work."

I bet you could get a bit of extra $ for it.

[ora]

Original airport cards can be ridiculously valuable actually, as they are hardish to get hold of now. I suggest ebay

[fryke]

Yeah: Sell (or use) the card, make a nice glowing lamp out of the body.

[nixgeek]

WHat I found interesting, especially with the original Airport Base Station, was that it had an Orinoco card and was run by an AMD embedded x86 processor (I don't remember which one actually, but it was an older revision of the x86....possibly 386). This was while I was replacing the capacitors that made up the PSU for the Base Station. Apparently with the first revision of the Airport Base Station, Apple used caps that weren't capable of handling the load, so after maybe a year or so it would fail. Replacing it with caps that could handle the load got it working again.

[sinclair_tm]

i'm looking for an airport card to put in my g4, and the one you pulled from the base station is the one i need. hint, hint...
but on topic, that is the same standard, non extreme airport card that is the same as wireless-b in the pc world. and it will work in all airport capable macs that aren't of the extreme variety, ie. g3 imacs, g3 ibooks, 1gig or less g4 powerbooks, most of the g4 towers, and maybe even early g4 imacs. and if it really works, and you don't need it, i'm sure it can fetch you enough dough for several meals selling it here (again, hint, hint) or on ebay.